Uber-producer Irwin Winkler, when in director mode, might not have the career of Alfred Hitchcock, but he knows how to borrow from him. “The Net” (1995) features nods to “Notorious” (a scarf around the midriff), “Strangers on a Train” (a dangerous carousel) and “Psycho” (a cop at a car window). One might say the whole film is a nod to “North by Northwest,” or perhaps Alan J. Pakula’s “The Parallax View” was more on Winkler’s mind, especially considering the final showdown’s location.
Not a total ripoff, “The Net” has a 1995 sheen. This was the heady days of the possibilities (for good and evil) of the internet. That’s one of two meanings of the title; the other is that Sandra Bullock’s Angela Bennett is caught in a net cast by a corporation whose front face is benevolent but which is actually sinister.
“The Net” is a kinetic thriller under Winkler’s direction, helped by a tight script from John Brancato and Michael Ferris. Broadly, there are two types of hacker films: those that explore the logistics of hacking, and those that use it to propel action or thrills. “The Net” blends the two.
“The Net” (1995)
Director: Irwin Winkler
Writers: John Brancato, Michael Ferris
Stars: Sandra Bullock, Jeremy Northam, Dennis Miller
It serves both aims of a hacker film
The accuracy of the hacking portrayals is good, to my inexpert eye. On her job, we see Angela going through code to debug systems. At other times, the villains’ hacks seem to magically happen; however, by the end of the movie we know how this was possible. When Angela gets to hack back at them, it’s both suspenseful and reasonably legitimate in terms of how she accesses the systems and what she does in them.
Films like “Hackers” and “Mission: Impossible” remind us of how primitive the mid-’90s was for computer technology, but the way Angela uses the web is recognizable. She clicks on items, types in URLs, that sort of thing. She perhaps uses anonymous chatrooms more than folks would today. She uses discs, the flash drives of the time. But she orders her pizzas via the internet.
The casting of a star is key here; we immediately like Bullock as Angela, who is pretty enough to have a great social life. But she’s an introvert, comfortable with her at-home debugging job in the L.A. area. Her idea of a wild vacation is reading a good book on a beautiful beach.
She also happens to be a tailor-made target for identity theft. “The Net” remains a cautionary tale that says go out and get to know lots of people. The villains’ schemes rely on nobody stepping up and identifying her as Angela Bennett once they change her records to say she’s Ruth Marx.
She works from home and her mom (Diane Baker) has Alzheimer’s so can’t ID her. Granted, these are lucky breaks for the villains, and in real life it’s a stretch to say all her connections could be severed. Heck, I thought she might call up the pizza place to get the delivery guys to vouch for her. Or how about the employees at her mom’s nursing home? Since she does know some people, of course, the baddies have to kill those people. It’s a lot of work, and it wouldn’t make much sense except that the main henchman has a thing for her and stupidly delays killing her.
Caught in a tangled net
Angela’s journey parallels Cary Grant’s confusion in “North by Northwest” but it’s terrifying in an additional way. While the baddies make Angela herself an unperson, they also saddle her with a debilitating new identity as someone with a laundry list of crimes. These villains step out of the shadows more than those in “Parallax View,” but things do look bleak.
A viewer’s natural inclination to think “Go to the authorities, someone will eventually listen,” but Brancato and Ferris have thought this through. And anyone who has had a mix-up with a faceless bureaucracy’s records will know that “The Net” has at least one foot planted in reality.
On top of that, it’s a good thriller, always giving us something to think about, such as Angela’s next strategic play or the question of who she can trust. Dennis Miller has a nice supporting role as an ex-lover; the things he says to Angela can be interpreted many ways. Either he’s truly helping her, or he’s humoring her, or he’s been bought out. “The Net” encourages us to be on our toes along with Angela.
Identity theft was an easy plot twist in the pre-digital age, from Agatha Christie novels to the later Hitchcock films. In Hitchcock’s catalog, “North by Northwest” is surrounded by several other films where people’s identities are flexible, sometimes by the protagonist’s desire, sometimes not.
By 1995, it had become a scarier point, as Angela’s identity is erased and replaced with such ease. We might be caught in a less-hackable net than what “The Net” portrays, but – especially now, when a greater portion of our identity is an “online identity” — it’s hard to write off this film as pure fantasy.