[This review was written for Cine TV Contest "Favourite Sandra Bullock Movie". Contains mild spoilers.]
In the 1990s personal computers were changing the world by invading homes with Internet modems and online gaming. The 1995 action thriller The Net capitalizes on the power assigned to computer systems in an average user’s mind by telling a story about a computer professional, who becomes a victim of identity theft and persecution largely thanks to the fact that information about her is being stored by computers that can be accessed using a phone line. Discard the fear of mighty computers being able to give unlimited powers over people, and you get a nice 90s thriller with 8-bit graphics, oversimplified Internet connections and a well dressed, and fairly well situated male antagonist chasing after bothersome female protagonist while making use of power granted to him by technologies of the day.
One of The Net’s writers was Michael Ferris, who also wrote the 1997 thriller The Game, which deals with, disregarding computers, similar themes to those of The Net and stars Michael Douglas. It had been one of my favourite thriller movies for a long time because, much like The Net, it’s very demanding of the protagonist, putting him in a terrible and desperate situation by taking away literally everything in his life, only to follow the subsequent struggle, where he tries and gets the stolen life back. The suspense throughout much of the film is exquisite. Sandra Bullock, who plays the protagonist Angela Bennett, a computer systems analyst in The Net, is notably better at keeping one’s composure, when compared to The Game’s Nicholas Van Orton. Ms. Bullock in this role competes even with herself in Speed, released a year earlier, where tension and stakes were supreme. Having lost her passport, her identity changed to someone else, left with no cards and bank accounts – basically left with nothing, Angela Bennett still doesn’t lose her temper, managing to think and act quickly, and in a rational manner, stealing phone and making calls after realizing the story about what had happened to her comes across as either deliberately made up or just plain delusional. I thought if her character was of a different background, not one working with computers, it would have come across as unnaturally devoid of ability to assess the gravity of the situation, however the reliance on calm logic was something I basically endowed the character with, which is to say, that particular quality is something the viewer can deduce over the course of the film, but it’s not shown in a demonstrative manner. The convincing effect of computer analyst’s background on me might largely have been due to the film’s Act 1, where Sandra Bullock is mostly seen as a stereotypical recluse, spending almost all her time at the computer in her own house, with the difference from the usual hacker type being that Angela Bennett looks like a character who’s supposed to be there to play with computers and act cute – there is no law breaking, accompanied by dubious real life individuals with deep interest in computer code and various manuals. In a way acting cute goes a long way in The Net because, for one, and unlike Sarah Connor’s case, it doesn’t lead to an incarceration in a state hospital.
The Net movie still with Sandra Bullock as Angela Bennett. Source
A different kind of suspense to that of an ongoing attempt to recover the life one’s had can be witnessed in the scene with both, the protagonist and antagonist being literally in the same boat in The Net. This may sound like something from a finale, yet it’s, in my opinion, the best part about it – it takes place as the film enters Act 2. When Angela Bennett gets in the boat, she is not aware of what really is happening. When she begins to have suspicions about Jack Devlin (played by Jeremy Northam) is where I thought Sandra Bullock delivered her best performance in the film with the question, “so what’s the gun for?” While sitting, looking up at Jack and sort of tampering with the said gun. Sitting, acting cute and using cold logic on a boat in uncertain circumstances has never looked more unimportant and casual.
The Net movie still with Sandra Bullock as Angela Bennett and Jeremy Northam as Jack Devlin. Source
When it comes to the end of Jack Devlin, it’s distastefully quick. But there had to be happy end obviously, and unfortunately characters from one film usually don’t get put into another, otherwise Jack Devlin should have been kept alive for one of the Saw films for all he’d done to Angela Bennett.
Read my review of 2022 movie Bullet Train with Sandra Bullock in a supporting role here.
Read my review of 2002 movie Cypher with Jeremy Northam in the lead role here.
I didn't know about the existence of that Sandra's movie, the plot from what I read in your publication is very interesting, I imagined what happened, but in the current context it must not be easy to be in a situation there.
Well, it's almost thirty years old movie and not the most popular one starring Sandra Bullock, so I think it only makes sense if people today don't know it as opposed to Speed, for instance.
I only mentioned part of the plot, which I thought was necessary when describing Sandra Bullock's role. There is a bigger picture and antagonist's motivations in it that I haven't mentioned. The situation Bullock's character ends up in is indeed dire; she only manages to turn it around thanks to her knowledge and expertise regarding computer systems, otherwise it's one of the worst nightmares anyone can imagine of becoming reality. In The Net it's not a game.
Exactly the network is not a game, I lived a very unpleasant experience for sharing too much personal information on a social network, I learned the hard way that our life is ours and that there is information that should not be there.
When I mentioned The Net and the identity theft, and persecution in it not being a game, I meant it as compared to The Game movie, which I have mentioned in my post.
The movie I wrote about doesn't deal with online data in the modern sense, but I think I know what you mean. I myself originally come from an Eastern European country, where, if you aren't a right wing conservative or are openly against Kremlin narratives and politics, you end up being harassed online, and sometimes even by security service in real life (there was a very distinct case of guys who decided to have an organization and go by name "The Left Patriots" back in 2013, which was basically their only offence). Even without all the materials provided by Snowden that have been made public by journalists it was clear that the first place anyone who doesn't like your views would turn to are your profiles on social networks. As the time went on, the ongoing disaster of people leaving their data online had become clearer, as Cambridge Analytica and Pegasus cases prove - the latter had even been linked to had been used against opposition politicians in some Eastern European countries.
And then there are, of course, stalkers, which I don't think I should be commenting on here since I don't think I myself have been stalked, hence it's better to leave it for those people who have dealt with that in their lives, even though sometimes, in my opinion, there is a difficult to discern difference between being harassed because of your views voiced online and stalking.
One thing that comes to mind that deals with the amount of data available online about a person and how it can be used is the Be Right Back episode from Black Mirror series. I think, in a way it's educational, same as some Mr. Robot episodes; particularly where Elliot manages to collect an information on his therapist.
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