30 Years Ago, Sandra Bullock Delivered the First Evil Internet Movie We Didn’t Know We Needed

30 Years Ago, Sandra Bullock Delivered the First Evil Internet Movie We Didn’t Know We Needed

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If you’re 30 or younger, you were not alive when big-budgeted and big-studio cinema took its first stab at portraying the World Wide Web. In 1995, the great Sandra Bullock starred in The Net, and while she is fantastic, per usual, the movie itself missed the mark and, more importantly, a chance to be at the forefront of the IT revolution that is now ensconced in our everyday lives.

All the ingredients were in place for perhaps a prescient take on the internet, and Bullock’s star was soaring after her breakout performance in Speed a year earlier. Irwin Winkler, who had procured elite status in Hollywood circles through his involvement in the Rocky franchise and nine Oscar nominations, was behind the camera. Unfortunately, while it is not a bad film and still has some relevance today, The Net chose to go a different route, and maybe there is a simple reason for it—we didn’t know enough about the phenomenon that the internet has become on the film’s 30th anniversary. It’s still an enjoyable watch, though ultimately, The Net walked so all the internet films that followed could run.

What Is ‘The Net’ About?

Angela Bennett (Bullock) is a brilliant programmer and encryption wiz who spends all her time alone at home solving other people’s computer problems. Though she is the best at troubleshooting, her social life is almost non-existent, as she is content passing on dating opportunities and socializing to order pizza over the web, tinker around online, and take vacations alone. When she comes across a dangerous Trojan horse malware program created by a dark web group known simply as” Praetorians,” her simple world is turned upside down in a matter of hours.

A group of hackers—or praetorians—has discovered a way to get into top-secret files and personal information. It has begun to manipulate things like the New York Stock Exchange and the LAX Airport boards. When one of Angela’s colleagues gets too close to uncovering the truth, he is killed on his way to meet with Angela, and the group assumes she is guilty by association. They decide to completely erase all records of her existence during a trip to Mexico, so when she returns after escaping a psychopathic assassin (Jeremy Northam), she is running for her life, trying to reestablish her identity.

‘The Net’ Did Well at the Box Office, but Could Have Been So Much More

Bullock had long proved she could shoulder the load of a project entirely on her shoulders, so people showed up to see The Net to the tune of $110 million in worldwide earnings. The issue with this 44% score via Rotten Tomatoes is that it represents a glaring missed opportunity. Again, no one, including principals like Bullock and Winkler, knew they were on the verge of cutting-edge plot devices. They were replacing trench coats, manila envelopes, and McGuffin cases associated with conspiracy thrillers up to that point with a brand-new medium of telling the same story with a completely different set of storytelling rules as we hit the 21st century.

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You have to remember that in the mid-90s, as the internet was sweeping the world, there were still clunky, noisy dial-up modems and big, bulky disks that had to be placed into a heavy hard drive. The Net had the potential to be the slick new version of this state-of-the-art technology but instead decided to make another John Grisham-esque thriller ubiquitous in the 90s that leaves a trail of dead bodies belonging to characters that we never really got to know. When you think about films like George LucasTHX-1138 and more modern movies like Pulse, Spree, or even Enemy of the State starring Gene Hackman and Will Smith, which came out only three years after The Net, these movies took the technology they had to work with and pushed cinema into bold, new spaces. Bullock made a fun film full of capacious, boxy computer screens and disk drives but ultimately failed to serve a larger purpose that maybe we didn’t even know existed then.

The Net is currently available to stream on Netflix in the U.S.

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The Net

Release Date

July 28, 1995

Runtime

114 Minutes

Writers

John Brancato, Michael Ferris


Cast

  • Cast Placeholder Image

    Sandra Bullock

    Angela Bennett

  • Cast Placeholder Image

    Jeremy Northam

    Jack Devlin

  • Cast Placeholder Image

    Dennis Miller

    Dr. Alan Champion



WATCH ON NETFLIX

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