The Net (1995)

In the dim, dead, dark days preceding my ownership of a PC, I was rather intrigued with the movie. Very Hitchcockian in its tone, and kind of a David-beats-Goliath theme that every one can relate to (Apple vs. Microsoft, employee vs. boss, ad infinitum). Seven years hence...I realize that many of the governmental entities supposedly "hacked" were, at the time of this movie, utilizing systems built when leisure suits were still the rage--and IBM was lord and master of the computer domain. Granted, hackers can be considered a real and acknowledged threat, but we should take this movie for what it is...Just some passably good entertainment and not too representative of R/T (Real Time for all you Netsurfing newbies). However, the plot remains fundamentally sound, and not too taxing on the mind.

Sandra Bullock gave a reasonably credible performance as programmer/support tech/consultant Angela Bennett. I realize that sex appeal fuels Hollywood, and it IS possible to have beauty and brains. But the story seems to have some fundamental flaws. What are the odds that NO one would know who you really were...It's impossible to think that we really have become the so-called "ghosts in the machine". As long as we have receipts, hard copies,friends and loved ones, we won't be caught in "The Net."

Some good performances by the smooth but irreverent Dennis Miller, and by the suave but deadly Jeremy Northam make for a movie worth watching when there's nothing better on the boob tube...Or if you're a closet geek like yours truly, you call friends and laugh about all the inaccuracies.

Fmovies: This is a typical Sandra Bullock movie in which she plays a mousy (but profane) woman who is in trouble but finds a way to survive and be the hero. Sound familiar?

There are plenty of holes in this story. Things just don't add up and some of the suspense is a little corny. But - that suspense is very good. There is a lot of tension in this story which has strong paranoia running through it. The story starts off slow but kicks in pretty soon and stays that way, making it an involving movie for the viewer. That's why I give it a pretty good rating - the movie gets you involved in it. Bullock is more cute than annoying, which she normally is to me, so this is my highest-rated movie with her in it.

This is a typical 90's movie. Fun to watch, cringe moments, some good and some bad acting. All in all, an entertaining 2 hours movie for no purpose weekends.

The Net fmovies. The net is an excellent movie! It's about Angela Bennett(in a great performance of Sandra Bullock) who is a computer expert who works for the Cathedral Company, cleaning virus and testing games for the clients. Angela is a typical nerd who doesn't have friends outside of the cyberspace,almost doesn't take vacations and go out, and stays almost all the time connected. One day her friend Dale Hessman(Ray McKinnon) asks her to help him,sending Angela a disk with a strange program that has many confidential informations. At the same night, when Dale was going to meet her, he is suddenly killed in a plane crash.Going to Mexico in her vacation,Angela meets a beautiful guy called Jack Devlin (Jeremy Northam)who shows to be a cold blood killer bastard and one of the guys behind all the secret of the Diskette.

Her life then turns into a nightmare: All her records are erased and she is given the new identity of Ruth Marx, a woman with serious problems with the police.

This movie is great because it shows how we, humans,depend a lot of the computers and machines(sometimes more that we should) and how vulnerable we are if someday ,someone decides to control and change our personal records,without letting us the chance to prove the error.

Think back to 1995, did you even know what I.D. theft was? Well Michael Ferris and John Brancato did, and at the time, it wasn't really that scary. In the film, Sandra Bullock lives alone, spending most of her time fixing her company's computers online. She seems to rarely go out or socialize except with others by computer. She even orders her food over the computer, and it's delivered. Because she keeps to herself, hardly anyone knows her personally, and her mother is in a nursing home with Alzheimer's Disease, so she doesn't remember her. Her only friend is an ex boyfriend, who happens to be a psychiatrist, and she's broken up with him. The fact that she's so incognito has a lot to do with the film. Before leaving for her first vacation in years, she get's a call from a friend in her company who is confused about a weird disk that's come into his possession, and wants her to help him. Not willing to figure it out over the phone or on the computer, he tells her he needs to see her in person and he's flying to her home in L.A. He never arrives...

The cast is great, with Sandra Bullock pulling out all the stops in her fight for what is right. There are no sex scenes, no violence or over-indulgent special effects, just content. Every movie lover should own a copy of this film as an example of how to make a film without over indulgence and heavy reliance on effect.. This is a film that can be viewed several times, with each time revealing a little more detail. There is less obvious comedy and glamour in this role, but Sandra Bullock is excellent and intense, as the woman fighting for her life, and ends on a happy note caring for her Mother, and with a new status, working from a new home. There were a lot of conspiracies in this movie, in my opinion its a film that makes you really think how controlled your life is by the internet. Very compelling story.

Overall rating: 8 out of 10.

Odd the way technology works. Less than a decade ago, there was this completely different technological world, a world of pagers, floppy disks, dial-up modems (which are as obsolete as typewriters), and gigantic brick-like cell phones. I remember being amazed at that little tiny flap at the bottom of the phone, as thin as a credit card and yet able to pick up your voice and transmit it through the air. Now it's a feature so obsolete that it may as well never have been there. Sandra Bullock plays Angela Bennett, a lonely computer analyst who is so connected to her computer that she sits on the beach in Mexico, on her first vacation in six years, with her laptop on her lap. It's not only like a source of nourishment but her connection to the world and the establishment and maintenance of her identity.

This is where her problems begin. Like The Manchurian Candidate back in the 1960s (and again in less than a week from this writing), The Net plays on the popular fears of the society in which it is released. The Manchurian Candidate originally played off the fears instilled in people by the recently ended Cold War, while The Net, a much less potent thriller, suggests the scary possibilities of a world in which we are so inextricably connected to computers. Probably the most interesting thing in the movie now is the computers, such as the massive laptops with the tiny screens, the indispensable floppy disks which are now almost nonexistent, the graphics, etc.

Angela Bennett has had her digital identity stolen and replaced with that of Ruth Marx, who has a lengthy police record and who thus takes over Angela's identity. It's pretty clever, I suppose, the way the movie presents Angela as though she hasn't left her apartment in six years and with a mother suffering from Alzheimer's (and thus not able to help identify the real Angela later), but it's pretty hard to believe that not a single person in the office where she worked noticed that Angela started being a completely different person. She had no significant other, was not dating, and no parents who could identify her, but was she such a recluse that even the people in the office she worked in didn't even know what she looked like?

At any rate, the plot of the movie is pretty smartly created, although it is created as though it were an excuse for a lot of chase scenes, one of which takes place on a merry-go-round in a great homage to Hitchcock's Strangers On A Train, one of the many classic films to which the movie alludes, several of them other Hitchcock films. Bennett has been given a disk which contains a website, I suppose, which turns out to contain a weakness in a security system about to be set up to protect everything from banks to Wall Street to the CIA. By holding down Control and Shift and clicking on the little Pi icon in the corner of the screen, you are transported from a ludicrous page about Mozart's Ghost, apparently a god-awful metal band, and into highly classified government documents. The disk provides the bad guys with a reason to want to capture Bennett, and thus you have a movie.

Angela goes from a comfortable but bored computer analyst, doing a lot of her work from home and ordering pizza on the Internet at the end of the day (presumably one of the future possibilities of the internet which never came to exist), to a wanted fugitive, ultimately caught and put into a jail cell for someone else's crimes. She has lost her home, her job, her identity, her life. Bullock actually puts in a p