Amazon.com video review:
The Net, the first of Hollywood's big cyberthrillers of
the mid-1990s, was also the most successful, thanks in large part to
the natural appeal of star Sandra Bullock. Still riding high from
Speed and While
You Were Sleeping, Bullock plays a computer expert victimized
by sinister cyberforces who steal her identity for reasons
unknown. It's a clever combination of high-tech paranoia and
Hitchcockian references (including Jeremy Northam as a romantic
stranger named Devlin, after Cary Grant in Notorious). Film
historians may look back someday on films like this--Roger Ebert
calls them "hacksploitation"--to see what they reveal about
our society's reaction to the increasing role of technology in our
lives, just as we now study the fears of Communism and the atom bomb
reflected in films of the 1950s. Dennis Miller and Diane Baker
costar. --Jim Emerson
Amazon.com video review:
The Net, the first of Hollywood's big cyberthrillers of
the mid-1990s, was also the most successful, thanks in large part to
the natural appeal of star Sandra Bullock. Still riding high from
Speed and While
You Were Sleeping, Bullock plays a computer expert victimized
by sinister cyberforces who steal her identity for reasons
unknown. It's a clever combination of high-tech paranoia and
Hitchcockian references (including Jeremy Northam as a romantic
stranger named Devlin, after Cary Grant in Notorious). Film
historians may look back someday on films like this--Roger Ebert
calls them "hacksploitation"--to see what they reveal about
our society's reaction to the increasing role of technology in our
lives, just as we now study the fears of Communism and the atom bomb
reflected in films of the 1950s. Dennis Miller and Diane Baker
costar. --Jim Emerson
