A Rede

This is one of those movies I loved as a kid. I gave it another watch now that it's on Netflix but sadly didn't live up to my memory. The movie has an interesting premise, especially for 1995: everything we do or own is just data on a computer. What if someone decides to change all that? It's a cool idea but it's not executed well with very little excitement.

Still, some things I learned:

• You could order a pizza on the net in '95
• You could already book a plane
• You only had a fancy BMW if it had a carphone
• She's using an Apple, I should have bought apple shares in '95
• Sandra Bullock was really hot in '95. Probably the main reason I loved it as an adolescent

This isn't a bad movie thriller to keep you off the Internet for two hours, but can you take the risk? THE NET sounds unconvincing since our love of computers and cyber-sputting expresses what the story is all about, and a possible fad to recognize. Thankfully, it does attempt to bring some raw suspense that is head-and-shoulders above other lame films that contend to "artificial communication". Once again, Sandra Bullock knows how to keep her fans happy, and even though it's no "chick-flick", she's still the likeable character inside. This time, she's stalked in a game of cat-and-mouse and becomes ruined by an identity crisis. Even with the brand new concept of cyberware, that's just normal for a suspense thriller. An old, traditional "chase" plot gives the movie a blip on the screen, but the story is greatly paced and exciting enough to increase your pulse rate to rapid highs. The computer mess is the biggest fuss some viewers will have in common, including all those not used to this new style. A good shot at a modernization of mystery-suspense films, but you know exactly what to predict here. Why the new TV series?

I like "The Net." I first saw it back in 1996, on VHS probably. We probably didn't have the Internet yet, or it was very new to us. So this was all very exciting, but scary too. There was a great sense of fear around identity theft. In 2015, we are such internexhibitionists with social media and twitter that people become lax and then their private sex-text photos get shared with billions of people.

The Net is a good thriller with an excellent title that is elevated by the charisma of star Sandra Bullock (still a star in 2015, amazing). Bullock is an incredible role model as a female hero: she is smart, funny, feminine and likable. The main issue for The Net over the years has been the march of time itself. Thrillers require a certain immediacy and immersion, and the mentioning of goofy out of date technological jargon risks dragging you out of the moment. As a period piece, or a time capsule, The Net is perfect, but does it still work as it did for audiences in 1995?

Luckily, the Net is not really about technology, its about the nature of identity in a bureaucracy, explored through the lens of technology, with the interweb as a weapon, and those issues are still relatable, and a movie like The Net serves as a good reminder of how trusting we have become of our internet privacy.

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 pretty good performance in the movie. I'm not a huge fan, but I appreciated the realness that her character had, since she is not an over the top actor, her characters are generally very real because she is as well.

Where the movie trips up is that it tries to suggest that such identity theft could happen to anyone in our technological age, but given the effort put into presenting Angela as someone with no personal contacts with just about anyone, really it could only happen to someone like Angela, and are there really that many people that no one can identify by looks? Even the guy at the local video store might recognize her as the lady who rents under her account. Oh well. There's also a glitch in the end of the movie that Mick LaSalle points out and that only people familiar with San Francisco, where the climax of the film takes place, will notice. As Angela rushes through a Macintosh exhibition at the real Moscone Center, she desperately tries to copy all the computer files before the bad guys get her. Pretty tense, but if she had been smart, she could have gone to The San Francisco Chronicle office, which is a block down the street from the Moscone Center.

But hey, maybe the Chronicle doesn't have high enough walkways out back.

I'm sad to see this movie has a relatively low rating. It isn't a perfect 10 but it's a very decent and enjoyable yarn. Get over the fact that it portrays a romanticised version of the internet that never existed - this was made a few years before it became commercially viable, so the majority of people didn't know a thing about it or what it looked like. Ignore this and you have a decent conspiracy thriller. Plus, the portrayal of the internet is infinitely more realistic than its cartoonish contemporary 'Hackers', which came out the same year. The tech isn't the star of the show here, and it doesn't rely on spectacle.