Benutzerrezensionen

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.

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.

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?

Okay, firstly I like Sandra Bullock anyway, but do admit she is not often lost in her characters and plays herself. She often plays slightly socially awkward characters however, she's believable, every-girl, and relatable and necessarily not too contrived especially in a storyline where you have to believe its happening and get involved.

Bullock is a computer analyst/programmer who works from home and gets sent a disk by a friend to look at. This disk causes problems which she has to work out during which she has to go on the run, her identity is erased. Angela Bennett is no more. It's scary stuff, and would have been more so back in the 90s when much of this was fairly new - it's very true that all our personal information is on computer so we all are vulnerable.

Sandra plays increasing desperation well, and the story unravels rather than unfolds, and is quite emotional in places - especially those including her mother with Alzeimer's. Jeremy Northam, Brit actor, and rather dishy, plays the antagonist, and plays it well. Being so attractive, his nefarious ways are even worse, and as all her safety is stripped away, he's always there to make her run again. I like that the programming scenes don't have silly graphics (see Hackers) but are clear key/screen clicks and code being typed and this is one of the most realistic of the many hacker films that came out in the 90s.

This has aged well, except some of the technology of course, and it's still relevant. It is interesting to see technology changes ie the ease and normalcy of tracing mobile phones now for example. Note the policeman reading the Miranda rights off a piece of paper - was this filmed around the time they had changed? Historically interesting watching it (again) now, in 2013. A good, entertaining film in a similar vein as The Pelican Brief - intelligent writing and not predictable.

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.

I first saw this when it was released and I'd never really even used a computer. Watching it in 2024 it seems clumsy and dated but the main theme, the warning of the world we're being dragged into, is still very relevant.

Identity theft and big corporate power are all around us. It's getting increasingly difficult to prove who I am without a mobile phone, and the personal data that is being hoovered up by big tech companies is out of control. People, even governments know this but are in denial and burying their heads in the sand, keeping up with the latest tech and hoping the problem won't affect them. But one day it will, when AI or hackers dump them, their bank accounts, their identity, their life.

This film is cringe-worthy 30 years after it was made because the world is moving so fast, but the warnings were there back then. Don't say that nobody warned you.

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.

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.

Angela (Sandra Bullock) is a computer expert but, being shy and somewhat of a recluse, she does all of her work from the confines of her condo. Just as she is about to take a vacation in Mexico, a co-worker sends her a computer disc with disturbing information on it. Angela agrees to meet with her fellow employee but he mysteriously dies in a plane crash. Angela heads to Mexico but takes the disc with her. While she is sunning on the beach, a terrific looking gentleman named Jack (Jeremy Northam) makes overtures to her. She falls for them and the two end up on a boat to Cozumel. However, Jack works for the folks who generated the secret information on the disc and he is out to get it. Even after Angela escapes from his clutches and lands back in the USA, Jack makes things difficult. He changes Angela's identity on every computer across the nation, making her lose her condo, her bank account, everything. Can Angela, a computer whiz, beat Jack at his own game? This very exciting movie has many assets. First, Bullock and Northam are two very beautiful, interesting actors and their presence adds immediate captivation. The script is very clever and sure in its knowledge of the capabilities of computers and their relevance in today's world. The costumes, sets, production, and direction of the movie are also quite wonderful. And, despite how it sounds, there is a great deal of exciting action as Angela goes on the run to defeat her enemy. If you love thrillers without unnecessary bloodshed or violence, this is a great choice. It delivers twists and turns with great frequency, making it possible for the viewer to "net" a very good evening of entertainment.

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 ****

Floppy disks? Dial up modems? To name just a couple of things. I suppose one of the problems of making movies that in any way revolve around technology is that technology evolves, and what seems cutting edge can quickly start to seem old fashioned. That's certainly the case with "The Net." Sandra Bullock did a passable job as Angela Bennett - a computer analyst of some sort who basically lives on "The Net." She works from home; she never interacts with anyone apparently except through computers. The only exception seems to be her mother, but her mother has Alzheimer's and doesn't know who she is. In 1995 the chat rooms and "the best pizza in cyberspace" and sending "electronic mail" probably would have seemed cutting edge to a lot of people. Less than 20 years later (and actually long before this) it's just really, really dated technology with rather grainy computer graphics - along with the aforementioned floppy disks and dial up modems. At times it's hard to get around that and settle into this movie.

And yet, at the same time, there's a strangely prophetic feel to this as well. I mean, in 1995 somebody made a movie that revolved exclusively around issues of identity theft and cyberterrorism - both very real concerns 20 years later. Not a bad job of gazing into the crystal ball, I'd say.

Angela gets caught up in a conspiracy by a group that seems to be trying to crash pretty much every computer system going. I have to admit that the plot came across at times as a bit convoluted. I wasn't entirely clear on the goals of the cyberterrorists; what they were hoping to accomplish. But they certainly did a good job of messing with Angela's life. While on vacation she meets and falls for a mysterious man who's part of the conspiracy. The conspirators then stole her identity and gave it to one of their own; they replaced her identity with that of a woman wanted by the police for a series of felonies. Basically her entire life was wiped out and replaced by a life she knew nothing about and that put her on the run, with nowhere to go for help. That was well done, and pretty smart. Her goal, of course, is to reveal the plot and regain her life.

There's some good action; and some rather cliché "chase" scenes involved. It stretches the bounds of credibility a bit, I think, by suggesting that there's hardly a person in the entire world who could vouch for who Angela really is. She's honestly had no contact with anyone? She spends every moment of every day in her apartment on a computer? If so, why did she go on vacation in the first place? Clearly she likes getting out. And her mother was in some sort of institution, and Angela clearly visited. Maybe her mother doesn't know her, but wouldn't some staff member of the institution know who she was? And wouldn't the company that sends her the "best pizza in cyberspace" have to have someone deliver it to her? There must have been someone who had seen her.

So, credibility's lacking a little bit, and this does have a bit of a quaint, old-fashioned feel to it. But Bullock is OK, and there's enough excitement in this to keep you watching. (6/10)

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 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.