The Net (1995)

July 24, 2023 8:46 PM

A computer programmer stumbles upon a conspiracy, putting her life and the lives of those around her in great danger.

Computer programmer Angela Bennett (Sandra Bullock) starts a new freelance gig and, strangely, all her colleagues start dying. Does it have something to do with the mysterious disc she was given? Her suspicions are raised when, during a trip to Mexico, she's seduced by a handsome stranger (Jeremy Northam) intent on locating the same disc. Soon Angela is tangled up in a far-reaching conspiracy that leads to her identity being erased. Can she stop the same thing from happening to her life?

Cheryl Eddy: The attorney treats her like she’s paranoid, but viewers in 2020 might have a different reaction to her lightbulb moment. Angela was onto something with that “little electronic shadow”—though the creators of The Net couldn’t have known it at the time, there’s now an entire economy built around the information we freely share every time we hop online. Identity theft, on a smaller scale than what Angela experiences but devastating nonetheless, is an all-too-common crime. While “hackers” in pop culture now usually resemble the anti-establishment warriors seen in shows like Mr. Robot, in real life, billionaires are indeed controlling a good chunk of what happens online. Though nobody lugs around computer discs anymore, ordering pizza online is still one of life’s lazy delights.

Carrie Rickey: The nicest that can be said about The Net, which combines the political intrigue of The Pelican Brief with the high-tech tools of Disclosure, is that during the course of the movie Angela becomes her own dream man - fortunately without the superhero tights or the genius hair. Other than Bullock, this would-be suspenser is a crashing bore about crashing computer systems.

In her routine consultant work, Angela discovers a conspiracy that has triggered the suicide of the undersecretary of defense, and sabotaged the systems at LAX and Wall Street.

Esther Zuckerman: The Net -- directed by Irvin Winkler and written by John Brancato and Michael Ferris, who also wrote David Fincher's similarly frenetic The Game -- should feel as dated as the expression "Where can I hook up my modem?" which Bullock literally says in this movie. Yet its terror still hits, perhaps because the idea that someone could access all your information via the internet and ruin your life doesn't seem that far-fetched anymore. But the thing you'll notice most about The Net when you re-watch it today is that it is weirder than you might remember, only not for the reasons you'd think.

Trailer

posted by Carillon (10 comments total)

I was actually quite surprised at how low the RT score was at only 44%. It's not the greatest movie, but it's actually pretty solid. For all the talk about how the tech might not age, by grounding it pretty close to what was possible, I don't get a lot of zeerust, shit worked like that back then and while it does feel old, it's not dated if that distinction makes sense. Dennis Miller is a creep, but they don't make the fact that he was taking advantage of her something that's a good thing, which was nice. It's a decent action thriller, a bit meh in some of the middle running around parts, but holds up nicely I think.
posted by Carillon at 8:49 PM on July 24, 2023 [1 favorite]

For a not insubstantial period in my twenties, Angela Bennett was my hero. The idea of working from home, alone, never seeing or speaking to another person except online, was life goals for me then.

(Now I work from home, so I guess I made it! … except I spend all day on Zoom with my camera on, so my dream of anonymity and solitude has been forever crushed :D)
posted by invincible summer at 8:54 PM on July 24, 2023 [15 favorites]

David Fincher's similarly frenetic The Game

*blinks* similarly frenetic? Huh.

Weird tangent in the review aside, I haven't seen this movie since high school (so nearly 30 years I guess, ugh), and I barely remember it partly because Sandra Bullock was in, literally, every movie made between like '93 and '98.
posted by Literaryhero at 5:12 AM on July 25, 2023 [1 favorite]

A while back I hosted a 1995 Cyber Movie Marathon - Hackers, Strange Days, Johnny Mnemonic, and The Net. Of all of them, Hackers has held up the best as far as both an excellent film and containing a lot of actual-factual internet hacking and phreaking (everything about Mr. The Plague and the Gibson aside).

Strange Days is hilarious because it's set in the near future of 1999, with one of those opening dystopian news broadcasts talking about how awful everything is... and the broadcast actually sounds better than our reality (at least as far as environmental disasters and mass murders go). Also, the entire plot is basically about a serial killer wearing Google Glass and uploading his snuff films to secret youtube. Easily the most prescient of the films.

Johnny Mnemonic was... well, it was Johnny Mnemonic. Either you're down for the camp bonkersness of it all, or you huff stodgily about how it deviated from Gibson's original text. I'm pro-camp-bonkers.

The Net was hands down the worst of the set, without competition. The entire thing felt like taking the most absolutely generic 'thriller' and setting it entirely in a 1994 basic cable news segment titled "Will You Take A Wrong Turn... on the Information Superhighway?". While the things that happened are not ~completely~ fantastical, the breathlessly hyperbolic way in which they were presented caused perpetual eyerolling. And I seem to recall the baddie falling and dying at the end in a fashion that was laugh-out-loud ridiculous, but that might just be a weird dream I had.
posted by FatherDagon at 6:19 AM on July 25, 2023 [4 favorites]

I barely remember it partly because Sandra Bullock was in, literally, every movie made between like '93 and '98.

With that girl from "The Bus."
posted by AndrewInDC at 7:00 AM on July 25, 2023 [3 favorites]

For all the talk about how the tech might not age

I saw it in the theater opening week, and the "tech" was 10000% horesehit even then. It might have been excusable as an "aging" problem if it were filmed sometime in the early 70s.
posted by Back At It Again At Krispy Kreme at 9:36 AM on July 25, 2023 [2 favorites]

The terrible secret is accessible by clicking a character on a publicly accessible website (which triggers a full-video whooshing montage with no loading time), so she puts it (what?) on a disk, and now everyone wants that disk. Make sense of that, I dare you.
posted by argybarg at 12:18 PM on July 25, 2023 [2 favorites]

There is nothing better than the surfer-dude "Mozart's Ghost! The hottest band on the internet!" reading. One of my college roommates used "Mozart's Ghost!" as shorthand for janky Web 1.0 design.

I watched this movie again recently; I made the mistake of watching Hackers first, which is a much better movie, but honestly? This is a perfectly competent mid-90s techno-thriller. It's a popcorn flick that knows exactly what it is, and it does a fine job with the goofy material.
posted by uncleozzy at 6:36 AM on July 26, 2023 [1 favorite]

I've still never encountered a pizza ordering website as good as the one in The Net.
posted by grumpybear69 at 8:29 AM on July 26, 2023 [1 favorite]

Awful movie, with a bad performance by Jeremy Northam as the most boring villain in movie history.
posted by holborne at 4:38 PM on July 27, 2023