A while ago, I posted “The 10 Geek Movies That Should Never Have Been” part 1 and part 2. Which sets us up nicely for the counter-point: What movies exist which really are geeky goodness? Sadly, very few. When Hollywood tries to market to geeks, they have a hard time seeing out of their little box. Independent films often hit closer to the mark. So, here’s the list of Geek Movies which got it right:

Keep in mind that I’m not citing movies which geeks typically like: Monty Python, Star Trek, Lord of the Rings, science fiction, etc. But movies specifically aimed at or about geeks, technology, hackers, hacking, and so on, or movies which indirectly capture geek psychology and culture.

#1.Sneakers - Number one, in shades. This movie actually manages to portray technology semi-realistically for its time, while presenting an engaging and twisty story. The main protagonists are a “tiger team“, security professionals who break into systems and then give the company a report on how they did it. This actually happens in the real world! As opposed to the usual stereotypes of how people think hacking is done, this shows them doing it the real way: social engineering, going through trash, exploiting flaws in hardware, and so on. Makes a moral point that it doesn’t matter how many firewalls and passwords you surround yourself with, if your security guards are so dumb they don’t know if they’re talking to the real police or not, and your employees can be set up through an online date to give you voice recordings to defeat the voice-activated password system.

#2.Brazil - Yes, it’s science fiction. It’s a dystopian future. It’s also a sappy love story and a loopy action flick, and a floor wax and a dessert topping! This movie watches like ten movies crammed into one, and is for this reason so well tuned to geeks who are less prone to sensory overload. But what makes it a geek movie is that it is a parody of computer usage and a security-obsessed society. From lines like “Computers are my forte!” to the relationship between Sam and his boss (we all get to help our clueless bosses out of a jam, don’t we?) to surreal scenes like having one of the heroes simply dissolve into paperwork (eaten by information, get it?) this movie screams “geek!” at every turn. The plot is even driven by a computer glitch; an actual bug gets swatted and falls into a teletype, causing a misprint in an arrest warrant which starts the whole plot going. Do not judge it by the badly butchered mis-release done by a moron of a studio executive who had a personal vendetta against director Gilliam; see instead the director’s cut restored to its full glory. Gilliam saw George Bush’s United States of the post-2000s coming all the way back in 1985, and captured it crystal-clear!

#3.Office Space - A satiric look at the circa-1990’s software industry. The only thing that needs to be said is that if you like Dilbert, you’ll love Office Space. This movie is so famous among geek culture that I’ll say no more about it; I’m only including it so I don’t get comments asking why I didn’t.

#4.Pi - The greatest geek movie to come out of the independent film world. Forget “Good Will Hunting”; this is what smart geeks are really like: freakishly intelligent, monastic, quirky, driven, anti-social, prone to paranoia, and hounded by the corporate world who see them as nothing but geese to lay golden eggs by using their big brains to do things like rig the stock market for them. Max’s apartment looks like he simply lives inside of one giant computer, which he names “Euclid”.

#5.The Fifth Element - The best Douglas Adams movie not done by Douglas Adams. What makes it a geek movie is that it perfectly captures the geek personality and world-view. Don’t be fooled by Bruce Willis as a taxi-driver turned mercenary: he is a Unix system admin. He reads the manual, he outsmarts everybody, he is surrounded by idiots, he’s smug and smirky, he spends half his time yelling back at the various gizmos and devices programmed to annoy him, he has complete disregard for the conventional rules of the system, hates authoritarianism, and if you get him on the phone with a higher-up (even the president) he cuts through the pompous speech and asks them to get to the point.

To be continue… right about…. NOW ! Geek Movies…

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Related Posts:

• The Top 10 GENUINE Geek Movies - Second 5
• Mysteries of the Geek Brain we Will Never Explain
• The 10 “Geek” Movies That Should Never Have Been
• Geek Stereotypes
• The 10 “Geek” Movies That Should Never Have Been: part 2