Comments
"Sneakers" is such an entertaining watch for anyone that's never seen it. Well worth your time.
A friend of mine that was in Desert Storm taught me this. Of course, he was on the other side
One of my favourites. Great cast.
Kingsley and Redford on the roof: "There's a war out there, old friend. A world war. And it's not about who's got the most bullets. It's about who controls the information. What we see and hear, how we work, what we think... it's all about the information"
They're not on the roof for that scene; they're in his office, using the computer room's air conditioning as a sound mask (and using a Cray Y-MP as a bench). While the movie takes some very early-90s liberties with technology (especially the scene where they use the chip), it's remarkably respectful of hacking -- there's a stronger emphasis on social engineering then the purely technical, and my "head canon" is that the chip itself is a quantum chip capable of breaking any then-known encryption.
By PhotonHunter 2025-09-1613:401 reply No, the roof: https://m.youtube.com/watch?v=Xk0Mzci2Sks
I'm thinking of the scene where they talk about the corrupting influence of money: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=ifJMFqSV7ic
I love the way you confidently relied on your 80s film trivia memory to correct someone online without double checking. Im not being sarcastic its kinda cool.
By parenthesis 2025-09-1614:082 reply Sneakers is from 1992.
By otikik 2025-09-1618:01 We have already established that not double checking is kinda cool.
The 80s ended in September 1991. One week “Use Your Illusion” was released, which meant it was still the 80s then. The following week “Nevermind” was released, so obviously the 90s started sometime during that week.
By nocoiner 2025-09-1618:55 This is terrific, I’m totally stealing this line to drop at my next dinner party.
By ionwake 2025-09-1811:23 For the first time in 10 years it looks like one of my comments has been flagged. And it was about 80s trivia. I love this crazy world.
By mbreese 2025-09-1616:56 > breaking any then-known encryption
(Also from fuzzy memory) Any then-known Western encryption. The chip was supposedly useless on Soviet/Russian encryption techniques, thus emphasizing who exactly the chip was meant to be used against.
It's also remarkably respectful of Bay Area geography -- they got the major bridges right. None of that Dustin Hoffman going the wrong way on the Bay Bridge stuff.
By ascagnel_ 2025-09-1716:38 Only a handful of scenes were shot in the Bay Area:
By iancmceachern 2025-09-173:36 Totally, one of my dogs favorite stops on our walk is that plaza where they met the "NSA agents"
By sillyfluke 2025-09-1620:28 Seeing as this is considered remarkable by some people, it makes me want to watch a compilation of all movie scenes that were an insult to Bay Area geography. There should be a channel someplace, where each video is a compilation of a different city/landmark.
By piltdownman 2025-09-1615:35 So much so that it arguably accelerated the introduction of the Clipper Chip by unimaginative spooks only a year later.
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Clipper_chip
For me the biggest Hollywood liberty taken is the beautiful ASCII Colourized UIs for federal agencies and ATC that they reveal with the decrypt!
By sedawkgrep 2025-09-1615:58 > it's remarkably respectful of hacking
This is one of my favorite things about the movie, and why I always recommended it to my security friends.
Anyone interested in learning more about social engineering should check out "The Art of" books by legendary hacker Kevin Mitnick.
Or… sticking to the theme…
The Old Man and the Gun
… another great film by Redford, about an elderly man who leans on his charisma and confidence to rob banks. Based on a true story.
By piltdownman 2025-09-1615:41 Or... The Sting!
Back when Social Engineering meant wearing a hell of a suit and dodging the 'Bunco Squad'. All the elements are there: Greed, Scarcity, a sense of urgency, all legitimised by the leveraging of Social "proof".
If it was remade today there'd be a good chance Redford would find Newman's character down on his luck running facebook ads for crypto scams featuring AI videos of prominent celebrities.
He more or less was everywhere when I was growing up in the 1970's. "The Sting", "All the President's Men", etc. "The Great Waldo Pepper" was often on T.V.
"Jeremiah Johnson" though is still a favorite of mine. Got me into blackpowder.
And surprised later when watching The Twilight Zone and he turned up as "Death": https://youtu.be/9tfyv4BZRug
By JdeBP 2025-09-1613:20 And, of course, "Three Days of the Condor", ending in the middle of "God Rest Ye Merry, Gentlemen".
By nobody9999 2025-09-1615:38 Don't forget Three Days of the Condor[0] in which he's supported by a fabulous cast as well.
By scjon 2025-09-1615:29 Jeremiah Johnson is one of my favorites of all time. Such a great movie. "You'll do well, pilgrim"
“Spy Game” is one of be one of the best spy films I’ve seen in terms of recruiting and handling assets.
Thanks for the recommendation. If you want realistic, modern spy show, I strongly recommend “Le Bureau Des Legendes”. I heard there’s an American remake, which probably makes it over-the-top for their audience, but the original is top-tier TV.
By mrexroad 2025-09-1720:38 Thanks for the rec! Will check it out. While a bit of a general bend (and not Robert Redford), I also felt Andor was a terrific portrayal of spycraft— the asset recruiting/handling, opsec, counter intelligence, etc.—and would still hold up equally well if extracted from SW and dropped into a contemporary setting.
By JKCalhoun 2025-09-1712:52 Plus one on the French, "The Bureau". Amazing series on spy-craft, double-think, and of course the risks.
By mstade 2025-09-1614:50 Great scene, thank you for sharing!
I think it is one of the more realistic hacker movies. You can read also about Leonard Adleman's participation in the movie[1]. Adleman is the A in RSA.
Also, Lawrence (Larry) Lasker[2] was the writer of Sneakers AND War Games!
By greesil 2025-09-1614:34 Oh my. Those two movies always had a similar vibe to me and now I know why.
Haven't rewatched since it was first released. As an audio person I was particularly impressed with a scene whereby someone who was locked in a trunk determined their location by remembering the sound made by bumps on a specific road. Is that right? Or am I thinking of the last time I was kidnapped?
By uptown 2025-09-1615:06 You've got it right: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=KuIheGaiFLM
By booleandilemma 2025-09-1615:05 The sounds that cars make over the different bridges iirc. Cool scene!
By xarope 2025-09-173:21 I think you are right. What did it sound like? The road? When you were in the trunk, the last time you were kidnapped, what did the road sound like?
/j
By asveikau 2025-09-1617:31 This tends to be a favorite scene of Bay area nerds. There's not too many other Hollywood mentions of the San Mateo Bridge.
By keitmo 2025-09-1616:14 "Remind me to make you an honorary blind person."
By nailer 2025-09-1613:31 It’s also one of the few hacking movies that stands up - assume ‘the box’ is a prototype quantum computer. Better yet assume it has a production process with such a high failure rate they’ve been churning these out for years just to produce a single working instance.
By vinkelhake 2025-09-1614:44 I first watched it back when it came out. At the time I was living in a different country and San Francisco was just another US city to me. I just happened to re-watch it yesterday (it still holds up) for the first time since moving to the bay area.
It was interesting hearing the names of the locations and bridges that previously meant nothing to me (except the golden gate).
It's free to watch on youtube at the moment: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=Qy9XYQBBIJ4
By gdubs 2025-09-1614:12 Not to mention one of the most ridiculously stacked casts — it's incredible how many greats are in it. And it's one of my favorite hacking movies of all time.
There are moments when I’m driving over the San Mateo Bridge and I instantly think about this movie.
By greesil 2025-09-1614:33 Any time I'm visiting and am on the Embarcadero. It's funny watching it, you can still see workers in the background cleaning up the median which used to have a freeway over it from the '89 quake.
By hbarka 2025-09-1617:07 Why, yes. At the reservoir.
RIP Mr. Redford and Sidney Poitier.
By ppcdeveloper 2025-09-1616:29 Sneakers is one of the main factors that got me into computing from Mathematics. Cryptography was new to the main stream when this movie came out. RSA was big time. Spy Games, Butch Cassidy and The Sundance Kid and especially Jeremiah Johnson all bad ass.
By castillar76 2025-09-1618:26 Interestingly, it has held up quite well, too: outside of the occasional bit of old tech sticking out here and there, the whole thing could be set in 2025 with a minimum of updating. The problem the MacGuffin solves, the methods for conducting their various heists, even the inclusion of the post-Soviet Russians as a player are all still valid today.
By pramsky 2025-09-1616:32 Someone released this a few years back.
https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=36799776 https://github.com/bartobri/no-more-secrets
By duxup 2025-09-1613:22 It's such a "old fashioned" kind of film, the key scenes are so memorable.
By booleandilemma 2025-09-1615:02 I saw it as a kid and it was one of the movies that inspired me to get into software.
I hope there are still movies being made today that inspire the next generation of programmers. It feels like it's all Marvel now.
By indigodaddy 2025-09-1717:10 Just FYI for anyone that wants to watch Sneakers, it's free right now on YouTube. And no ads if you have YT Premium/Music.
By sgt 2025-09-1613:03 My first thought when I saw his name. I love many of his movies but Sneakers has to be my favorite!
By geerlingguy 2025-09-1612:372 reply "My voice is my passport. Verify me"
By braum 2025-09-1613:35 just a few days ago I had an idea for a shirt and sent it to a designer on fiverr. I was very pleased with what I got back. "Secrets are Power" was my nod to one of my favorite movies Sneakers! Rest in Piece Mr. Redford.
http://bit.ly/3Ip3tr3 link to the shirt if you want to look at it. there is a message encoding in the background.
"All is Lost" (2013) funny enough got me interested in offshore sailing in my late teens.
Incredible performance by Redford, first film that really left an impression on me. There is only one or two lines of dialogue in the entire film.
By kerblang 2025-09-1614:10 I do think this is one of Redford's very best films. A lot of detractors make the mistake of assuming the character is intended to represent an expert & experienced sailor, leading to a complete misread of the story. It is possible to be both clever & unwise.
Edit: Screenplay link! https://thescriptsavant.com/movies/All_Is_Lost.pdf
I loved this very much, and I've seen it a couple of times. Together with "Touching the Void" it ranks high on my list of the best survival pictures ever made, a specific genre I enjoy very much.
And it's very intimate. 106 minutes of just you the viewer, and Robert Redford. I might just rewatch it tonight. It feels fitting.
I got into mountaineering (movies) after reading Into Thin Air, about the disaster atop Mount Everest in 1996. Haunting story, fantastic book.
For real life lost at sea stories, there’s “438 Days: An Extraordinary True Story of Survival at Sea” telling the story of fisherman Salvador Alvarenga that spent more than a year adrift in the Pacific Ocean.
By hcrisp 2025-09-1619:09 Not as long but similarly lost at sea, crossing the Atlantic in a life raft: "Adrift: Seventy-six Days Lost at Sea" by Steven Callahan.
By testing22321 2025-09-1620:301 reply If you love survival stories, checkout “Deep Survival “ that analyzes why some people survive and others don’t. Brilliant
By mongol 2025-09-1619:33 How interesting, there is another movie called "438 days", although in Swedish, which is about two Swedish journalists imprisoned in Ethiopia for espionage. https://sv.wikipedia.org/wiki/438_dagar (Swedish)
By tsoukase 2025-09-1618:18 This is not a film, this is a lesson to all ocean sailors. When I travelled along the Pacific in 2009 we were prepared for the cases that happened in the movie. I have dreamt about them and then I watched them.
By lr1970 2025-09-2012:03 > There is only one or two lines of dialogue in the entire film.
Technically speaking with only one actor in the entire film there can be no dialog. These were couple of expletives. I love the movie -- it is so different.
By spapas82 2025-09-1613:25 I even got the protagonists watch (seiko Pepsi)
By konfusinomicon 2025-09-1614:34 my favorite performance of his! its a movie that keeps you on the edge of your seat the whole time. so many anxiety inducing moments, especially for those who fear the ocean
By JodieBenitez 2025-09-1613:01 Came here to say this. Incredible movie.
Redford's Sundance Institute and Sundance Film Festival was a monumental contribution, changing the film industry for the better, a boon to indie filmmakers. IMO this is Redford's most important legacy.
This is so essential now especially as Hollywood has become more consolidated and corporate.
By julienchastang 2025-09-1613:27 I heard the late Roger Ebert once say that Robert Redford had done more for independent cinema than anyone.
By javier_e06 2025-09-1616:161 reply Indeed. I read that movies like "The Blair Witch Project" and "Napoleon Dynamite" got their break at Sundance.
By kranke155 2025-09-1617:33 Quentin Tarantino went through Sundance Lab while preparing Reservoir Dogs. There is some test footage of him and Steve Buscemy he shot there reciting some dialogue.
He also met Terry Gilliam there, and he always recounts this first meeting fondly, so the festival led him into meeting an important mentor.
Outside of Quentin, Paul Thomas Anderson, a lot of people are called the Sundance Generation. Sundance changed cinema.
By kilroy123 2025-09-1616:19 Yup! He was a huge part in giving so many filmmakers a shot at becoming household names. Not a lot of people know about this.
I'm sad about his passing. I've always been such a huge fan of his.
By itisit 2025-09-1623:09 Had Redford passed some 30 years ago, your remarks would have been true. By the early 2000s, Sundance became nothing more than a marketplace for a formulaic film type (quirky dramedies with offbeat characters) that big studios (a.k.a. Hollywood) would bid over. Sundance ultimately commodified "independent film".
By m463 2025-09-1622:40 I just realized this is probably from the sundance kid in some way
