Quartile rating: 6/10 · 1 rating
Angela Bennett is a freelance computer systems analyst who tracks down software viruses. At night she hooks up to the internet and chats to others 'surfing the net'. While de-bugging a new high-tech game for a cyber friend, she comes across a top secret program and becomes the target of a mysterious organization who will stop at nothing to erase her identity and her existence, in order to protect the project.
The Net is a mid-90s techno-thriller that captured the zeitgeist of early internet anxiety with reasonable effectiveness. Sandra Bullock's performance is committed and carries the film further than the script deserves. The plot, however, is riddled with contrivances and logical gaps common to the genre, and the identity-erasure premise, while novel for 1995, is executed in a fairly formulaic thriller framework. Cinematography is workmanlike Hollywood studio fare with nothing distinctive. The ending wraps up too neatly and lacks tension, feeling anticlimactic given the stakes established. Its novelty lies primarily in its prescient internet-surveillance themes rather than any craft distinction.