The Net (1995)

(In French, On Cable TV, May 2019) There would be nothing special about The Net being a mediocre cyber-thriller if it wasn’t that it’s an early mediocre cyber-thriller, presenting with breathless excitement a few things (online pizza ordering being the least of them) that we have since come to take as granted. It’s a profoundly paranoid and silly film, with familiar tropes dressed up in implausible graphical front-ends. Still, it’s good as an archeological expedition down the early strata of the Internet in popular fiction. I’m still a bit amazed that, being a computer science student building his own web site at the time, I never saw The Net in theatres—no matter: the second-best time to see it is right now given its mid-1990s charms. Speaking of which, there’s Sandra Bullock being cute and reacting to computer screens, while pre-insanity Dennis Miller turns up as a semi-repellent helper. Still, it’s the various cinematic attempts to make the early Internet accessible that hold our attention today, with graphical avatars and hidden identities being predictably part of the whole thing. In many other ways, it’s a bog-standard woman-on-the-run movie, with omnipresent cathode-ray monitors. There’s a definite charm to those 1990s cyber-thrillers (Hackers being the other one), and frankly The Net has aged better than more extreme examples as The Lawnmower Man or Johnny Mnemonic (as is; has become less remarkable in its overall plotting elements given how they’ve seeped into real life.) I’m not sure I’d recommend The Net as a movie, but as a period piece it’s already remarkably twenty-five years later, to a degree seldom as noticeable as other movies of the time.