Hack the Planet

For as long as the concept of an “information superhighway” has been part of the popular imagination, people have been making films about folks hijacking it for their own purposes. Few who’d never set foot in the halls of MIT were familiar with the term “hacker” when Matthew Broderick decided to play a game of Global Thermonuclear War in the 1983 surprise hit WarGames, but in the decades to come the lone code-slinging nuisance would take on an ever-larger presence on-screen, with the KGB-backed teen Karl Koch, played by August Diehl, in the based-on-a-true-story German thriller 23, Rooney Mara’s tatted-up Swedish cyberpunk in The Girl with the Dragon Tattoo, and the all-star ensemble of national security caper Sneakers just a few instances of cinema’s keyboard cowboys. You could illegally download these films, of course, but it wouldn’t quite be the same.