I’ve always loved the move Sneakers. Not just because it appeals to the geek in me but because it is a finely crafted film.

Listening to the Writers/Director voice over on the DVD brings home the craft of what it’s like to write a fine piece of film. Not only does it help you appreciate this movie more but other well-made films.

Movie Synopsis: Lets keep this simple. It’s about a group of men who get paid to break into secured systems in order to test a companies security. Their leader, played by Robert Redford, has a past that they are not aware of. Two men hire/blackmail Redford’s character into doing a job for them. The job is fairly simple, it’s to recover a little black box from a professor of mathematics. It’s at this point that everything goes to hell for our main characters. To say any more would give away too much of a wonderful story.

Even though this movie is now over 12 years old it still remains timely. Credit that to the writers who had the foresight to see the role information would play in our society with the emergence of the Internet in our everyday lives and the birth of the World Wide Web.

Just a few years after this movie came out we had movies like Hackers and The Net that are in the same genre as Sneakers. It’s amazing to think back and see that this movie, which came out before the common person had ever heard of email, web pages, or the Internet, is one of the better Technology Fiction movies of our time.

The voice over given by the writer/directer Phil Alden Robinson and writer Lawrence Lasker is enlightening. Not just for the occasional bit of trivia - like that the scene in the beginning of the movie where Martin Bryce is standing in a snowy courtyard is the town square courtyard from Back to the Future - but also for the insight into what it’s like to write a screenplay. They bring up many instances of having additional scenes in the screenplay that were unneccesary or how many of the scenes play a dual or even triple role. I even learned a new screen writing term: Laying Pipe; adding something innocuous to a scene that is later shown to be instrumental in a later scene.

Note: the writer Lawrence Lasker also wrote the script for War Games which they talk about a few times during the VO.

The music score for the movie is from James Horner who also did Braveheart and Titanic. It would be redundant to mention that it is first rate.