Hackers the movie will always have some measure of infamy to it with the computing/hacking community, because to them it looks fairly silly and unreal. From using Mac computers, to using graphic art in the place of code and file structures, this movie is almost guaranteed to offend the sensibilities of much of the computing community which takes itself far too seriously.
Much of this film is actually pure genius in terms of how it was presented to the non-hacking community, which somehow never comes up in discussions of its merits.
In a day when the majority of non-computer aware individuals think of hackers (or crackers) as evil script kiddies bent on ruining their lives for pure fun), this movie takes that sort of person and makes them a hero, for once, as well as doing so in a way that actually lends some measure of understanding to the uneducated viewer.
You could, of course, use a cream colored box with enormous amounts of lines of code and MS-DOS file structures to do all of your hacking with, but you'd bore the viewer to hell and gone, for the most part. Nobody but the coder wants to watch that. However, sharp looking computers and great graphics...yeah, we can do that.
Getting deeper into this idea... in the portion of the film in which they're trying to crack the worm/virus element, the virus is represented on-screen by a double helix spiral element with a lot of floating debris, which eventually all comes together when the virus is solved. This may look incredibly silly to your average programmer, but to the uninitiated, this is a great graphical representation that they can easily connect to in their minds to tell them what is going on.
As for the cookie monster, the rabbits, etc., at the end, it's still yet more graphical representation of what the viruses are doing... filling up space in an attempt to lock up the mainframe. If you're complaining about how unrealistic these images are, this effort was not aimed at you.
The film also offers up Joey, the youngest member of the group, as an obvious script kiddie... Somebody whose only point is to show off and try to belong, or try to mess things up. The others are much more together, and have definite points and logic to what they do. Joey is shown as being quite the loser, which most of your audience is going to see, and acknowledge. It's not a fair way of doing it, but it works.
While it's likely that this film is an offense to defenders of Geek Pride everywhere, it definitely clues the rest of the world into, perhaps, what could be really going on, and how there is, in fact, a difference between hackers and crackers.