The Net - 20 years on
Starring Sandra Bullock, The Net is 20 years old this week.
Twenty years ago this week, Hollywood entered the online fray, warning cinema audiences of the perils of hacking, identity theft and a life lived on The Net.
Starring a fresh-faced Sandra Bullock (basking in the glow of the double success of Speed and While You Were Sleeping), Irwin Winkler's Hitchcock-inspired, Cyber action-thriller was part of a wave of global conspiracy tales that swept into cinemas during the mid-1990s (many inspired by John Grisham novels).
It told the story of Bullock's programme systems analyst Angela Bennett, who finds herself at the mercy of the evil "Praetorians" after she's sent a website link (on a 3.5 inch diskette no less) that appears to provide a backdoor into the websites of various government organisations. While she's still trying to work out the significance of it all, they've caused chaos at LAX, Atlanta Power and Water, Wall St and Chicago's banks.
But it's when she goes on her pre-booked holiday (airline reservations confirmed online gasp! while eating her internet-ordered pizza shock! and indulging in a little cyber chatroom flirtation horror!) to Cancun, that Angela's life begins to unravel. Encountering the charismatic Jack Devlin (they swap such irresistible banter as "We're sitting here on the most perfect beach in the world and all I can think about is
.where can I hook up my modem?"), played with pantomime effectiveness by Jeremy Northam (all that he's missing is a moustache to twirl), she awakes from a romantic evening gone awry to find her passport stolen, cards no longer valid and her identity changed to Ruth Marx a woman with a lengthy rap sheet.
As Wellington man Aaron Doody's sorry tale illustrated just last week, identity theft is still very much possible two decades later. But how does the rest of the technology related warnings and musings from The Net stack up today?
First up, it is amusing to watch characters wrestle with large-aerialed fliptop phones and listen to parents promising "quality Nintendo and Sega time". And certainly it was spot on with its picking of pizza delivery and airline bookings as two key future uses of the internet. However, the idea of needing to load a disc to access a website seems pretty barmy, as is the concept of being able to wipe out a whole system via the Escape key and, in one of the films decidedly un-techy moments, using a spreadsheet to do word processing.
The online chatrooms with their text and Siri-voice combo are fairly hilarious though I guess the 1995 equivalent of Chatroulette.
As with many Hollywood films of the era, the good guys are Apple users (MacOS7 the operating system du jour), with the baddies toting PCs (which of course makes virus compatibility, particularly via disk a little far fetched) and the central McGuffin involving a website security system with a deliberate "flaw". It's a hoary old device still used in tech-infused action-thrillers today, as anyone who has seen either Terminator: Genisys or Kingsman: The Secret Service will tell you.
In the end, The Net was supposed to be cautionary tale about putting your life online. "They know what I drink, eat, the movies I watch, the cigarettes I smoke. Our whole lives are on there and they knew I could be vanished," opines Angela. Flash forward 20 years and we all willingly give up such data just to access information, or order what we want, when we want.
As Wired magazine so succinctly put it in a reflection on The Net a couple of years ago: "In 1995, this was a shocking problem that people had to learn to deal with. In 2013, it's basically how Facebook works."
All you need is love. But a little chocolate now and then doesn't hurt. (Charles M. Schulz)
Responses