(1995) The Net

This movie is visionary. It’s Mr. Robot before it was cool. There’s hacking, there’s working from home, there’s phishing and identity theft, and they invent the word “simp”. Well, Sandra does!

Story

Sandra Angela Bennett lives as a secluded system analyst for a huge cybersecurity company. She works from home, nobody knows what she looks like, and can fix anything. Yup, she’s awesome. At the beginning of the movie, we see her removing a virus from what can only be identified as Wolfenstein 3D. After that, she goes into chat rooms and opens up to complete strangers.

With her being such an expert, it’s not surprising that her friend from work snail-mails her a plot device floppy with some weird program on it. The program, turns out, can break into almost any system with the Pi symbol in the corner.

She calls up her friend, he already knows, and wants to meet her before she goes to vacation. She reluctantly agrees, but his plane mysteriously crashes. Sad as it is, she decides to still leave, as this is her first vacation in 6 years.

While she’s sitting on the beach with her laptop, like any decent person would do, a strange guy appears out of nowhere and is a perfect match in every way, down to his favorite movie. Turns out he’s a bad guy that just wanted to get the disk and followed her online to figure out what she likes. During the escape, she falls overboard and ends up in a hospital for three days.

The bad guys didn’t sleep, though. They stole her identity and invented a new one for her. But this one isn’t nice, it’s a criminal record. She manages to return home, but there is no home, she sold it a few days ago. Except it wasn’t her, but the replacement Angela planted by the bad guys. Since she never left home, nobody was suspicious of this change.

Long story short, the bad phishing dude turns out to be working for the Praetorians, a mysterious hacking group or whatever that managed to push their “Gatekeeper” protection software in all echelons of the government, giving them absolute control over everything. That’s why the Pi symbol isn’t stupid, no government employee is sharp enough to notice something like that, and everyone in the know has easy access to things they need.

I completely skipped over the part with Angela’s psychiatrist because he’s just awful and as condescending as they come.

Final Verdict

This was a rewatch, but I forgot how realistic the “hacking” in the movie is. Sure, one could nitpick about this and that, but they actually did a good job without anyone asking. Just look at what Hackers did with their hacking scenes - all-sizzle-and-no-steak.

Also, there’s a lesson to be learned here - everything is online and everything can be broken into. Be careful!

Category	Rating
Story	08 / 10
Characters	06 / 10
Sandra Bullock on-screen-time	10 / 10
Sandra being a badass hacker	10 / 10
FINAL RATING	10 / 10