User reviews

Nostalgia may play a large part of my positive feelings towards this film as I watched it repeatedly on video with my younger sister as a teen. Back then "the net" was a new and largely undiscovered frontier, and this film romanticized hackers and the seemingly mysterious world wide web.

I would liken this to a less ambitious version of 'The Fugitive', a film that released two years prior (and by most accounts a superior thriller). Much of what happens in the course of this film is standard fare, but it is presented with a semblance of realism and never seems to hit any lulls or real snags in rhythm despite the frenetic pacing. The plot isn't entirely plausible or devoid of clichés, but it remains interesting from start to finish, and Bullock carries the role well.

There are scattered scenes that show astute directing on the part of Irwin Winkler, though some of the secondary characters give uneven performances. However, Bullock does an admirable service at depicting a frumpy insular woman uncomfortable with her own sexuality and outer beauty. Her character is both resourceful and vulnerable at once, and it's a fresh pace to see a female lead with some layers to peel back in a genre dominated by men. Dennis Miller is very likable in his role, and ably acts the part with a more downplayed version of his real life persona. He was my favorite character by far and brought a lot of warmth to the role.

I'm usually very critical of any movies I see, and am generally turned off by standard Hollywood fodder, but there is a certain charm to 'The Net' that I can't deny. I liked it in '95, and I like it again almost twenty years later. Like visiting an old friend, there's a familiarity to it that is so hopelessly 90's and so reminiscent of a bygone era--the inception of the internet age--that it carries a certain weight to me unmatched by the multitude of forgettable popcorn thrillers of the decade.

This is one of those movies I loved as a kid. I gave it another watch now that it's on Netflix but sadly didn't live up to my memory. The movie has an interesting premise, especially for 1995: everything we do or own is just data on a computer. What if someone decides to change all that? It's a cool idea but it's not executed well with very little excitement.

Still, some things I learned:

• You could order a pizza on the net in '95
• You could already book a plane
• You only had a fancy BMW if it had a carphone
• She's using an Apple, I should have bought apple shares in '95
• Sandra Bullock was really hot in '95. Probably the main reason I loved it as an adolescent

This awesome, action-packed little gem, is one of my all-time favorite movies!! Sandra Bullock, once again, outdoes herself in this wicked film all about the Internet and the taking-over of people's lives.

In 'The Net', Bullock stars as Angela Bennett, a computer-whizz, who while on holiday, encounters a dangerous man, who steals her wallet... and her life.

Soon, the real Angela Bennett disappears, and an ex-con, takes on her identity, swapping her life for Angelas!

Of course, Sandy isn't the type to take this kinda thing lying down - and all on her own, she fights hard to get back the life they took away from her.

A wicked film - that'll leave you breathless for start to finish!! 9/10

I'm sad to see this movie has a relatively low rating. It isn't a perfect 10 but it's a very decent and enjoyable yarn. Get over the fact that it portrays a romanticised version of the internet that never existed - this was made a few years before it became commercially viable, so the majority of people didn't know a thing about it or what it looked like. Ignore this and you have a decent conspiracy thriller. Plus, the portrayal of the internet is infinitely more realistic than its cartoonish contemporary 'Hackers', which came out the same year. The tech isn't the star of the show here, and it doesn't rely on spectacle.

Odd the way technology works. Less than a decade ago, there was this completely different technological world, a world of pagers, floppy disks, dial-up modems (which are as obsolete as typewriters), and gigantic brick-like cell phones. I remember being amazed at that little tiny flap at the bottom of the phone, as thin as a credit card and yet able to pick up your voice and transmit it through the air. Now it's a feature so obsolete that it may as well never have been there. Sandra Bullock plays Angela Bennett, a lonely computer analyst who is so connected to her computer that she sits on the beach in Mexico, on her first vacation in six years, with her laptop on her lap. It's not only like a source of nourishment but her connection to the world and the establishment and maintenance of her identity.

This is where her problems begin. Like The Manchurian Candidate back in the 1960s (and again in less than a week from this writing), The Net plays on the popular fears of the society in which it is released. The Manchurian Candidate originally played off the fears instilled in people by the recently ended Cold War, while The Net, a much less potent thriller, suggests the scary possibilities of a world in which we are so inextricably connected to computers. Probably the most interesting thing in the movie now is the computers, such as the massive laptops with the tiny screens, the indispensable floppy disks which are now almost nonexistent, the graphics, etc.

Angela Bennett has had her digital identity stolen and replaced with that of Ruth Marx, who has a lengthy police record and who thus takes over Angela's identity. It's pretty clever, I suppose, the way the movie presents Angela as though she hasn't left her apartment in six years and with a mother suffering from Alzheimer's (and thus not able to help identify the real Angela later), but it's pretty hard to believe that not a single person in the office where she worked noticed that Angela started being a completely different person. She had no significant other, was not dating, and no parents who could identify her, but was she such a recluse that even the people in the office she worked in didn't even know what she looked like?

At any rate, the plot of the movie is pretty smartly created, although it is created as though it were an excuse for a lot of chase scenes, one of which takes place on a merry-go-round in a great homage to Hitchcock's Strangers On A Train, one of the many classic films to which the movie alludes, several of them other Hitchcock films. Bennett has been given a disk which contains a website, I suppose, which turns out to contain a weakness in a security system about to be set up to protect everything from banks to Wall Street to the CIA. By holding down Control and Shift and clicking on the little Pi icon in the corner of the screen, you are transported from a ludicrous page about Mozart's Ghost, apparently a god-awful metal band, and into highly classified government documents. The disk provides the bad guys with a reason to want to capture Bennett, and thus you have a movie.

Angela goes from a comfortable but bored computer analyst, doing a lot of her work from home and ordering pizza on the Internet at the end of the day (presumably one of the future possibilities of the internet which never came to exist), to a wanted fugitive, ultimately caught and put into a jail cell for someone else's crimes. She has lost her home, her job, her identity, her life. Bullock actually puts in a pretty good performance in the movie. I'm not a huge fan, but I appreciated the realness that her character had, since she is not an over the top actor, her characters are generally very real because she is as well.

Where the movie trips up is that it tries to suggest that such identity theft could happen to anyone in our technological age, but given the effort put into presenting Angela as someone with no personal contacts with just about anyone, really it could only happen to someone like Angela, and are there really that many people that no one can identify by looks? Even the guy at the local video store might recognize her as the lady who rents under her account. Oh well. There's also a glitch in the end of the movie that Mick LaSalle points out and that only people familiar with San Francisco, where the climax of the film takes place, will notice. As Angela rushes through a Macintosh exhibition at the real Moscone Center, she desperately tries to copy all the computer files before the bad guys get her. Pretty tense, but if she had been smart, she could have gone to The San Francisco Chronicle office, which is a block down the street from the Moscone Center.

But hey, maybe the Chronicle doesn't have high enough walkways out back.

This isn't a bad movie thriller to keep you off the Internet for two hours, but can you take the risk? THE NET sounds unconvincing since our love of computers and cyber-sputting expresses what the story is all about, and a possible fad to recognize. Thankfully, it does attempt to bring some raw suspense that is head-and-shoulders above other lame films that contend to "artificial communication". Once again, Sandra Bullock knows how to keep her fans happy, and even though it's no "chick-flick", she's still the likeable character inside. This time, she's stalked in a game of cat-and-mouse and becomes ruined by an identity crisis. Even with the brand new concept of cyberware, that's just normal for a suspense thriller. An old, traditional "chase" plot gives the movie a blip on the screen, but the story is greatly paced and exciting enough to increase your pulse rate to rapid highs. The computer mess is the biggest fuss some viewers will have in common, including all those not used to this new style. A good shot at a modernization of mystery-suspense films, but you know exactly what to predict here. Why the new TV series?

Stumbled upon this as I was going through my suggested films on Netflix. Decided to watch because of Sandra Bullock.

I got to say it was refreshing to see a movie set in the mid 90s, where all the technology then seem to be obsolete now. I mean, I don't remember the last time I held a floppy disk?

The plot itself was okay.. it started off slow but gets exciting towards the end.

If you want to watch something chill and have nothing else to do, then I recommend this. But if you expect more, then you'd probably be disappointed.

When "The Net" was first being advertised, the ads made it look ridiculous. Then, when I saw it, it was actually quite good. Angela Bennett (Sandra Bullock) spends her days working on the computer and has never gotten to know her neighbors. Then, through a series of events, her identity gets erased by a cabal of shadowy people, and she can't prove that she exists.

Some parts of the movie are a little bit far-fetched; you'd probably know which parts if you saw the movie. Still, it's a good look into what the existence of the Internet may have wrought on unsuspecting people. I do recommend it.

Sandra Bullock is very appealing as an unloved independent systems analyst who unknowingly gets hold of a disk that could bring worldwide chaos; pretty soon, she's dodging bad guys, running from the cops and putting her allies in danger (including Dennis Miller, who is surprisingly good). Despite a penchant for filming mouths in close-up, Irwin Winkler has directed a very fast, fun technical-thriller in which charming Bullock is bounced from one nightmare to another. I loved the way she gets out of a building swarming with security: she dons a fireman's outfit and escapes, but then the bad guys see a nicely piled fireman's outfit (and helmet!) sitting on the sidewalk and yell, "She's getting away!" Just one example of how this movie is so completely brainless, but yet entertaining enough on a non-think level that you tell yourself not to notice. You'll hate yourself in the morning, though. **1/2 from ****

I saw this film just last night, and I liked it. I know a lot about the Internet and so I DID notice the factual errors, but I was able to ignore them and enjoy the suspense. Sandra Bullock was good, and Jeremy Northam was creepy as the bad guy, mostly because he was so goodlooking and smooth that he was hard to hate.

I'd give it an 8 out of 10 for good suspense and an interesting look at the Internet when it was just beginning.

This is a typical 90's movie. Fun to watch, cringe moments, some good and some bad acting. All in all, an entertaining 2 hours movie for no purpose weekends.

"Laughable. Watching characters using DOS-based systems and dial-up modems must be quite bizarre for anyone used to today's smartphone and nano technology" Wow.

Just imagine watching a movie taking place before electric kettles boiled water more quickly than a pot on a stove; or when people rode a horse and cart; or when people had...gasp...a phone at home that went ring-ring.

Get some maturity with your age.

Welcome back to another edition of Adam's Reviews **queue in intro music**

Today's movie review is the suspense thriller The Net (1995) starring the sensational Sandra Bullock as computer expert Angela Bennett whose life revolves around debugging software computers, chatting to her friends online and works remotely so here is minimal human contact. She has a mother who lives at a facility for advanced Alzheimer's care and wouldn't know Angela from a nurse. Angela comes across a disturbing program that seems to be hacking into government, banking, hospital and other systems through a supposed cybersecurity program. Before she can meet with the online friend who raised his concerns over the program, the online friend is killed in a mysterious plane crash. Angela blithely proceeds with her Mexican vacation, but doesn't put two and two together until she meets a dashing stranger on the beach by the name of Jack played Jeremy Northam. Jack lures and seduces Angela and reveals himself as a cold-hearted killer looking for the program. Angela barely escapes the attempt on her life and her identity is not only erased through license, social security and other records, but Angela, fingerprints and all, is given a new name of Ruth Marx and a rap sheet attached to this name that includes prostitution and drug crimes, putting her on law enforcement's radar. Another hacker in on the scheme has taken over her identity at work and put her house up for sale.

"Our whole lives are on the internet!" is a line of Bullock's character which in reality fuses the gripping notions of identity theft, invasions of privacy and internet tracking that can be tied to the capabilities of not just multinational firms hacking into our lives but also government agencies. Paranoia is a key theme in this film as no one is who they seem - imposters abound, everyone appears suspicious which you can see in the movie where Angela gains allies and then quickly loses them. What remains are her consistent enemies who will not sleep until their prey is chased and hunted down. My only issue wit the film is he character of Jack Devlin, the assassin who plays this smarmy, arrogant, overconfident guy yet also has this sick sadistic and obsessive performance towards Bullock's character which you almost want to vomit. Maybe this is why I find him as the primary villain not genuinely threatening as the performance at times becomes artificial. Sandra Bullock does well for a sympathetic, isolated, spunky protagonist, who is fun to watch even if the plot takes a turn toward the realm of overly predictable thrillers. The filmmakers had a persuasive point to make about the outsized role computers were playing in our lives, so we can forgive the fact that back in 1995 most internet access was gained by agonizingly slow dial-up modem, complete with screechy dial tones, dropped connections, and halting downloads. Overall 7/5/10.

21 January 2010. The Net (1995). It's hard to assess THE NET as a computer espionage thriller. It is less action than Enemy of the State (1998) and less poignant in some ways that War Games (1983), and not quite as intimately juvenile/teenager and smooth and polished as Antitrust (2001). In some ways The Net is a psychological thriller that depends more on the subtle, covert computer focus than most of the other movies in as such might be considered a much better, pure form of the this subgenre of computer-espionage thriller. There is the mother-daughter subtext as well as the rather powerful deception twist and the friendship and loss scenes that have some impact. Interestingly the climax seems long in coming and the frustration level quite high in this particular movie. Much of Sandra Bullock's behavior and action seem to be consistent and reasonable considering the circumstance she finds herself and fascinating in that she doesn't need to depend on extraordinary measures outside of her on-screen character which in some ways dampens the excitement of the movie but at the same time places it more in the human-reality context. The overall effect is to make the movie less captivating and yet in a strange way more compelling because of its connection to the Everyman. 7/10.

Made and released at the time when the internet was just becoming huge, this is a storyline Hitchcock would have loved.

Sadly, Hitchcock wasn't around to make it, and we're left with an occasionally suspenseful but mostly silly thriller, that is held (barely) together by Bullock's intelligence.

It was released in 1995 but is already dated, and the amount of mistakes and inaccuaracies regarding computers must be seen to be believed, and you don't even have to be a dot.com person to spot them!

I like "The Net." I first saw it back in 1996, on VHS probably. We probably didn't have the Internet yet, or it was very new to us. So this was all very exciting, but scary too. There was a great sense of fear around identity theft. In 2015, we are such internexhibitionists with social media and twitter that people become lax and then their private sex-text photos get shared with billions of people.

The Net is a good thriller with an excellent title that is elevated by the charisma of star Sandra Bullock (still a star in 2015, amazing). Bullock is an incredible role model as a female hero: she is smart, funny, feminine and likable. The main issue for The Net over the years has been the march of time itself. Thrillers require a certain immediacy and immersion, and the mentioning of goofy out of date technological jargon risks dragging you out of the moment. As a period piece, or a time capsule, The Net is perfect, but does it still work as it did for audiences in 1995?

Luckily, the Net is not really about technology, its about the nature of identity in a bureaucracy, explored through the lens of technology, with the interweb as a weapon, and those issues are still relatable, and a movie like The Net serves as a good reminder of how trusting we have become of our internet privacy.

This was made in 1994-1995 at the beginning of the internet craze and the dot-com bubble, and this movie was wholly appropriate for the time era considering many people were just starting to get on the internet at this time. There are a lot of flaws in this film I agree, which is why I have rated it a 6, but my main complaint here is some of the reviewers on this site. Granted this movie was made at the beginning of the internet era, but some people on here make it sound like 1995 was back in the "horse and buggy" days. Either they were born after 1990 and don't remember a time without the internet or they are old as heck and were finally dragged down to the computer store just recently by their kids to get their very first computer.