Ars kicked March off with our own kind of bracket: one full of movies about hackers, cybercrime, and computer trickery. We asked for your votes, and in spite of your complaints—for example, why'd we pit Hackers against Sneakers in the first round—you responded in kind, helping us whittle down a much larger selection to a final four list of candidates for best hacking movie.

In our final round of voting, we're changing the usual bracket elimination process for something a little more intense. Four hacking movies will enter—Office Space, TRON, War Games, and Jurassic Park—but only one will leave. Yes, it's a hacker movie free-for-all! You've had a month to ponder on your favorites, so read through the final contenders and cast the most brutal vote the Internet has seen since that Slashdot poll that asked voters to predict the vote percentages. (That one's still hurting our brains.) Once the voting concludes on Sunday night, we'll update this post with our thoughts on the results.

Office Space, 1999

Films it already beat: Antitrust, Superman 3, Hackers

Why it's l33t: The ultimate dream of technology is to never have to work again, right? Well, this movie brings all the satisfaction of following a couple of nobodies who not only fight for the dream, but beat a printer to death, to boot. Trapped in a fluorescent-lit workspace, Peter Gibbons and his two software engineer buddies alter the company's account system to embezzle fractions-of-cents, but end up stealing much more than that. Along the way, Gibbons imparts a philosophy of work that many have tried and failed to live up to: “I did absolutely nothing, and it was everything that I thought it could be." Happy weekend! —Megan Geuss

War Games, 1983

Films it already beat: Wargames: Dead Code, Enemy of the State, The Matrix: Reloaded

Why it’s l33t: Remember the Soviet Union, the Cold War, and fallout shelters? The reality of mistrust between the USA and USSR formed the backdrop for this thriller. In his first starring role, Matthew Broderick plays a young hacker who hacks into a NORAD supercomputer. Not knowing he’s messing around with military hardware, he ends up playing the games installed on the machine. It starts innocuously enough with the likes of chess and backgammon, but then proceeds to a cool-sounding simulation called Global Thermonuclear War. Problem is, he can’t access it until he cracks a password. After an assist from some hacker friends, he figures out the password and gets to play the cool-sounding game. Only problem is that everyone at NORAD thinks it’s the real deal and that a Soviet missile launch is imminent. The hacking scenes are very dated, but as a teenager who spent every minute possible in the computer lab, I could only dream of having the kinds of hacking adventures Broderick’s character did—not to mention having a girlfriend as hot as Ally Sheedy. —Eric Bangeman

TRON, 1982



Films it already beat: TRON Legacy, Weird Science, The Girl With the Dragon Tattoo

Why it's l33t: Never mind that this was the first really, really cool movie about video game culture, it also did a great job splitting its bad-guy duties between a soulless suit and a sentient computer named Master Control Program. The whole film revolved around masked, unwanted entry into a computer system, so in many ways, this flick is the grandaddy of our entire list. That being said, Flynn's actual command-line efforts in the film are pretty minimal; once he breaks into ENCOM's labs and gets his hands on a keyboard, he's digitally transferred to the system's game world, and from there, every early '80s computer concept imaginable becomes a living object. But, hey—light cycles! —Sam Machkovech

Jurassic Park, 1993

Films it already beat: The Core, Independence Day, Blackhat

Why it’s l33t: Putting aside the pseudoscience of cloning dinosaurs (just fill in the gaps with frog DNA!), I’ve always seen Jurassic Park as a film about how nothing is ever completely secure, especially a fence holding a bioengineered T. Rex. A disgruntled programmer is able to turn the once-novel amusement park into a land of horrors in a matter of minutes, and the only other person in the group who can work a computer is a teenage girl. If the movie was set in 2015, dozens of workers would be on hand to fix Dennis Nedry’s hack job (though based on the trailer for the upcoming Jurassic World, security is unsurprisingly still an issue at a park filled with caged dinosaurs).

For fun, click here for a site that replicates the park's central console. Fun for minutes! —Tiffany Kelly