Hollywood’s Top 12 Tech Heroes

Better hope Lisbeth Salander (Noomi Rapace) never has you in the crosshairs of her laptop. She’ll uncover your deepest, darkest digital secrets — and then you’re toast. We’re going with the original movie starring Rapace, not the 2011 version starring Rooney Mara and Daniel Craig. Rapace is electrifyingly cool.

Every gang needs a techie to do the real heavy lifting of computer hacking and surveillance work. Among the “Ocean’s” robbers was Livingston Dell (Eddie Jemison), a twitchy techie. How are his nerves? Not so bad you notice, says No. 2 man Rusty Ryan (Brad Pitt). Our favorite Dell quote: “D-D-Don’t, don’t, don’t, don’t touch that.” Wish all end-users would heed his words.

In order to understand how far the image of techies has come, we need a baseline. And that baseline is Michael Bolton (not that Michael Bolton) played brilliantly by David Herman in “Office Space.” He was the stereotypical techie — a closet rap music listener and Bill Gates lookalike. He would describe managers as having “thumbs up their as—s” yet wilt in their presence. The hit he put on the fax machine was pretty bad-ass.

Ah, who can forget cracker Stanley Jobson’s (Hugh Jackman) job interview with bad guy Gabriel Shear (John Travolta) in “Swordfish”? Jobson’s test: break into the Department of Defense’s encrypted site in 60 seconds while a gun is pointed at his head and Helga is, um, distracting him. Did he pass? Access granted.