In both 2001 and WarGames , the people are powerless and left to suffer the consequences or the fear of the consequences of what they have inadvertently wrought. And in both scenarios the bystanderism is pretty gripping stuff. More recent films like Sneakers and Hackers have also used technology and computers to help drive their stories and attempt to create such suspense. With all kinds of gadgetry at their disposal, the good guys try to keep the bad guy from using the little black box to shut down entire coastal power grids, disrupt air traffic control systems, or flat out burglarize big banks. Both stories are predictable.
Hackers has the added defect of being vapid.
The latter are still man vs. man stories. Laurence Mason, Jesse Bradford, Renoly Santiago, Matthew Lillard, Angelina Jolie, and Jonny Lee Miller portray cyber-rebels on the new frontier in Hackers . All of the technology in the world can't make Hackers interesting - although it is pretty to look at. Maybe people vs. computer scenarios are inherently more interesting because in the real world we haven't had to deal with the full impact of what could go wrong and what the little soulless boxes could do to us - not on the scale encountered here anyway. It's fun to terrorize ourselves with the thought of the potential horror stories that we might create when we continue playing supreme being with silicon.