giant computer companies, Pinwheel Robotics in America and Kobayashi in Japan, both of which engage in violent corporate espionage. Angelina plays the part of Casella “Cash” Reese, an android who has been injected with an explosive liquid that can be detonated by remote control. Her masters at Pinwheel Corporation plan to use her to destroy their rivals at Kobayashi and take over the world. Cash figures out what’s happening when she is tipped off by her martial-arts instructor and a mysterious stranger, played by Jack Palance, who has invaded the Pinwheel computer network. Cash saves the day at the end, giving Jolie her first taste of being an action hero, and foreshadowing her success as Lara Croft years later.
Just before the film was released, Jon Voight was acting in a theatrical production of Chekhov’s The Seagull in New York. He gave a TV interview in which he comes off as a proud papa, discussing both his children’s foray into show business. “My son Jamie is nineteen, and my daughter Angelina is seventeen,” he told CNN, “and Marche and I have done our very best to be the supportive parents that we have learned to be and labored to be. And now these two children are both going to be in my world, in the world of film and theater. Angie, my daughter Angelina, has just done a little film. She is so proud that I am on stage. Jamie has been writing. He doesn’t show me everything. He has only shown me three little pieces, one about a five minute piece, then a half- an-hour piece, then a two-hour movie script. But he says to me quietly, ‘you know, Dad, I’ve written eighty works.’”
When Cyborg 2 was finally released in 1993, the critics were harsh, with one newspaper slamming it for “hammy acting and a mumbo- jumbo plot that prompts unintentional laughter.” It went straight to video obscurity and emerged only after Jolie achieved fame, probably because she had a topless scene in it.
Hollywood has always banked on its ability to anticipate coming trends, especially because the average film takes years to make, from conception to release. When the idea for Hackers was first floated, many people still didn’t own a computer and most had never even heard of the Internet. But by the time the script was finally commissioned, Nirvana had brought punk music into the mainstream, and computers were suddenly hot. What better way to combine these two trends than to produce a “cyberpunk thriller”? The concept must have looked good on paper because its producers had high hopes that the film would score big with critics and moviegoers as the first Internet-era blockbuster. They hired British director Iain Softley; he had won praise for his film Backbeat , which captured the Beatles’ early years while avoiding the clichés that so often plague such efforts. The producers felt his brand of distinctive originality was just what Hackers needed.
The script, set in New York, depicted a subculture of edgy high school hackers and their inadvertent involvement in a corporate extortion conspiracy. It follows a Seattle youth, Dade Murphy, who, as an eleven-year-old tech prodigy, was convicted of crashing more than a thousand computer systems in one day and causing a massive drop in the Dow Jones Average. Upon his conviction he was banned from owning or operating computers until his eighteenth birthday. When he turns eighteen, Dade takes up hacking again, at first simply causing mischief, such as tapping into a local TV station and changing the program it was broadcasting to an episode of The Outer Limits . After he enrolls in a new high school, he meets a beautiful girl named Kate Libby, whose own hacking skills rival his. Most of the film centers on a hacking duel between Dade and Kate, which eventually turns into a complicated tale about international corporate espionage and potential worldwide environmental disaster. The role of Kate was pivotal, and Softley was aware that the success of the film required just
Just before the film was released, Jon Voight was acting in a theatrical production of Chekhov’s The Seagull in New York. He gave a TV interview in which he comes off as a proud papa, discussing both his children’s foray into show business. “My son Jamie is nineteen, and my daughter Angelina is seventeen,” he told CNN, “and Marche and I have done our very best to be the supportive parents that we have learned to be and labored to be. And now these two children are both going to be in my world, in the world of film and theater. Angie, my daughter Angelina, has just done a little film. She is so proud that I am on stage. Jamie has been writing. He doesn’t show me everything. He has only shown me three little pieces, one about a five minute piece, then a half- an-hour piece, then a two-hour movie script. But he says to me quietly, ‘you know, Dad, I’ve written eighty works.’”
When Cyborg 2 was finally released in 1993, the critics were harsh, with one newspaper slamming it for “hammy acting and a mumbo- jumbo plot that prompts unintentional laughter.” It went straight to video obscurity and emerged only after Jolie achieved fame, probably because she had a topless scene in it.
Hollywood has always banked on its ability to anticipate coming trends, especially because the average film takes years to make, from conception to release. When the idea for Hackers was first floated, many people still didn’t own a computer and most had never even heard of the Internet. But by the time the script was finally commissioned, Nirvana had brought punk music into the mainstream, and computers were suddenly hot. What better way to combine these two trends than to produce a “cyberpunk thriller”? The concept must have looked good on paper because its producers had high hopes that the film would score big with critics and moviegoers as the first Internet-era blockbuster. They hired British director Iain Softley; he had won praise for his film Backbeat , which captured the Beatles’ early years while avoiding the clichés that so often plague such efforts. The producers felt his brand of distinctive originality was just what Hackers needed.
The script, set in New York, depicted a subculture of edgy high school hackers and their inadvertent involvement in a corporate extortion conspiracy. It follows a Seattle youth, Dade Murphy, who, as an eleven-year-old tech prodigy, was convicted of crashing more than a thousand computer systems in one day and causing a massive drop in the Dow Jones Average. Upon his conviction he was banned from owning or operating computers until his eighteenth birthday. When he turns eighteen, Dade takes up hacking again, at first simply causing mischief, such as tapping into a local TV station and changing the program it was broadcasting to an episode of The Outer Limits . After he enrolls in a new high school, he meets a beautiful girl named Kate Libby, whose own hacking skills rival his. Most of the film centers on a hacking duel between Dade and Kate, which eventually turns into a complicated tale about international corporate espionage and potential worldwide environmental disaster. The role of Kate was pivotal, and Softley was aware that the success of the film required just
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