The Net by Irwin Winkler reminds us what the internet used to feel like

Luca Franceschini
2 min readAug 26, 2022

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26 August 2022

TL, DR: 🖱️🍕🤓

I recently saw The Net, a 1995 thriller starring Sandra Bullock. It is enjoyable, as long as you don’t question the baddies’ actions. If not, you will keep wondering “Wait, why didn’t they just…?”. The strength of the movie is its depiction of the internet at a time when it was starting to become a thing.

SPOILER ALERT

Sandra Bullock plays Angela Bennett, a hacker living in Venice, California. She is doing marvels with technology, like:

  • working remotely,
  • ordering a pizza online,
  • chatting with people online.

Angela is wrapping up her last day of work, ready to go on vacation. In Mexico, the handsome Jeremy (Jack Devlin) is another hacker, who happens to be next to Angela. While she is opens her laptop. On the beach. In 1995.

Obviously he is a baddy, a bad one. He must to retrieve a floppy from Angela’s purse. Instead of just stealing the purse, he is going to have dinner with Angela, seduce her, let another guy steal the purse, run after the guy, kill the guy, go back to Angela, take her on a boat, get laid, grab wine, then try (and fail) to kill her.

Angela manages to escape, but the floppy gets damaged. A real hacker would have made a backup, and definitely not relaid on a floppy.

The rest of the movie is The Fugitive with hacking. Everywhere Angela escapes, the baddies are hacking her way closer to her. She still manages to murder the chasers and save herself by the end.

Despite its flaws, I enjoyed and recommend The Net. The movie is not exiting, but it is charming in reminding us how we live metaphorically and literally in the future.

Originally published at https://lucaf.eu on August 26, 2022.

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