The Dumbest Hacker Scenes in Movies

If you know a little bit about computers, you notice that ALL the hacker scenes in Hollywood (well, OK, pretty much ALL the hacker scenes in Hollywood) are godawful. As a director, all you have to do is follow these rules if you want your hacker scenes to be properly "hacky":

1. Hackers only need a phone booth or an iPod to "hack into" anything.
2. Operating systems do not look like Windows. They must have a black background, and everything else must be somehow more interesting too, and preferably involve maps.
3. To find a user profile (always with photo), the screen must flash through ALL user profiles at breakneck speed, one after the other.
4. The more 3D you use to visualize the inner workings of a computer, the better.
5. An H4ck3r does not use a mouse. Not even to zoom in on satellite photos.
6. Typing on the goddamn keyboard must under no circumstances have anything to do with what actually happens on screen.
7. Important data can only be downloaded from workstations at the heart of enemy territory, and only frantic, uninterrupted typing can prevent the download from aborting.
8. In the decisive scene, real hackers only need to press "Enter" to win.
9. Absolutely everything is networked, even the fridge, which, thanks to the enemy hacker, mutates into a killer fridge.
10. Hackers make backups on floppy disks, because they are the only people in the world who make backups at all.

Here is my list of movies that have particularly distinguished themselves through dumb hacker scenes.

#6 Enemy of the State

Sure, the NSA has some really cool toys. But I don't buy that even a system for tracking cash flows comes with a super chic GUI that also shows you photos of the account holders.

#5 The Italian Job

An Italian city with a central system for controlling traffic lights, which you can hack into, and which also happens to have a gorgeous GUI with a street map? Italy can't even manage central road signage, let alone a computerized traffic light system. Keep dreaming.

#4 Firewall

From an iPod and some random phone parts, you can build an iPhone. Uh, no, a thingamajig for outsmarting the bad guy. Doddery Harrison Ford might once have escaped the Empire in the rickety Millennium Falcon, but that he cracks iPod OS in no time? I'm not buying it.

#3 The Net

Is it really enough to spot a Pi symbol on a homepage to almost get hunted to death? And of course you are the only person on earth who bothered to look at the homepage more closely.

#2 Hackers

Yep.

#1 Jurassic Park

Only virtual reality lets you edit gene sequences quickly! Operating systems are in 3D and need at least a minute to fly from one file to the next, while a Velocity Raptor watches over your shoulder.