A computer programmer stumbles upon a conspiracy, putting her life and the lives of those around her in great danger.
The internet was an unknown and fear-driven place for many folks in 1995 and “The Net” takes complete advantage of this culture by creating a thriller driven by a premise where hackers had the potential to ruin the lives of ordinary people through the internet. Sandra Bullock plays Angela Bennett, a computer software engineer with the brains of a hacker, living a relatively ordinary life in a rather mundane corporate setting while finding adventure by collecting viruses and making breakthroughs in software cracks. Bullock as a young actress is a much different vibe and having been exposed to her career through films like “The Blind Side,” it is a wonder to go back in time and see her in an action thriller.
Angela is young and skilled, but she is still naive to certain sinister realities when her world is turned upside down. A colleague sends her a floppy disk with an odd backdoor that allows the user access to confidential data and information. Suddenly, Angela goes from ordering pizza on a Friday night and going on holidays to Mexico to being chased by a sleazy conman and getting her identity replaced into Ruth Marx. Soon we discover Angela’s tragic backstory of being abandoned and taken advantage of by the men in her life and suddenly, it is not so odd to see how lonely her life may seem. “The Net” allows Angela to evolve from being a lonely and attention-starved engineer to being a badass hero who indirectly captures a large community of hackers, which is just the character growth we needed to complete the film.
“The Net” may be a thriller from the ’90s but its premise continues to strike true, even in the age of modern technology. We may not be using modems anymore, but the fact that all of our personal information is running about unguarded online is still an unchanged factor. While it is horrendous to imagine someone using our personal information to create a whole new online persona and change legal documentation to the point of extreme invasiveness, the film leans more towards exacerbating a conspiracy theory than breaking down a series of events that may happen in reality due to an invasion of privacy.
Something that remains striking about the plot of the film is the usage of different levels of antagonists. At first, Jack Devlin (Jeremy Northam) seems to be the primary antagonist, using Angela’s vulnerable need to acquire the floppy disk that allows backdoor access to any confidential information on the internet. However, it is not to gain the tool that allows such access but to destroy its existence in order to cover up an entire syndicate of hackers responsible for the suicide of the Undersecretary of Defense after falsifying a positive test for AIDS and for various Wall Street stock market-related crashes. Not only is there such a syndicate, but it is finally revealed that the syndicate was born from a tech CEO named Jeff Gregg, who was in charge of building the software that allows for such backdoor access. While it was a long and winding road, the development of the antagonist from a single person to an entire corporate conglomerate is also not as far-fetched from modern realities where we continue to hound our tech CEOs with much skepticism.
“The Net” is full of conspiracies and skips around through various connection points to build a story that is akin to some vulnerabilities of having the internet permeate our modern realities. It is an exhilarating film and one that leaves room for plenty of contemplations on how we may continue to approach the internet and its usages with caution and trepidation.
Available on Blu-ray February 16th from Mill Creek Entertainment
