The Net (Autumn, 1995)
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Starring Sandra Bullock, Jeremy Northam, Dennis Miller
Columbia Pictures

Review by Emmanuel Goldstein

The summer of 1995 will be remembered as the year Hollywood discovered the
Internet. And, now more than ever, we need to pray that life will not imitate
art. Barring an even more intensive dose of stupidity in the land, it's very
unlikely that The Net will ever come true.

This is not to say that it s necessarily a bad film. In fact, the first part is
nearly flawless, with a growing sense of something about to happen and an
unpredictable yet plausible way of the plot unfolding. Toward the middle and
especially at the end we see the standard Hollywood cliches coming into play -
car chases, incredible luck on the part of the victim, incredible stupidity on
the part of the villains, and technological fantasizing that people who have
never seen a computer before would have no difficulty picking apart.

You'll feel a rush after seeing The Net, as if you had just been through an
exhilarating experience-a good sign for any action flick. However, the more you
think about it, the more those little tiny things will bother you, to the point
where you'll experience frustration and the desire not to think about it
anymore. This is all very natural.

You'll wonder how it's possible for a person to lead a somewhat normal life and
not have a single person anywhere who can identify them. At least on UPN's
Nowhere Man, all of Thomas Veil's friends and relatives have been touched or
removed in some way. The villains of The Net are not nearly as omnipotent. So
where the hell is everybody? True, Angela Bennett's mother has Alzheimer's (not
a good person to rely on for verification of anything), and her ex-S.O. (Dennis
Miller) meets an untimely end. But surely there must be someone else on the
planet who will recognize Angela (played convincingly by Sandra Bullock, who
really shouldn't have gotten off the bus for this part). Nobody surfaces.
Conversely, where are all the people who can identify her as Ruth Marx, the
person the evil Praetorians have turned her into? They don't exist either yet
no doubt is cast on her identity in this case because everyone has blind faith
in The Computer. It s oversimplification. As is the pitiful scene where Bullock
seizes the wheel of a car driven by a fake (and evil) FBI agent and crashes it
into another car that coincidentally happens to have the evil mastermind in it.
We can forgive the technical inaccuracies but the unbelievability and dumbing
down of the plot cannot go unremarked.

The point is made early but that doesn't stop it from being hammered repeatedly
into our heads. Yes, it's not a good idea to live our lives entirely through
computers, where we order pizzas, conduct our social lives, and get medical
attention entirely through the virtual world. We need to remain human. We've
got to go outside and leave the computers and modems behind for a while.

What the average computerphobic viewer will do after seeing this film is vow
never to get near one of these monsters at any time in the conceivable future.
After all, look at all the harm that can be done with such an instrument. Look
at what happens to someone who uses computers frequently - they lose their
identity in the real world and nobody will know who they really are. Using one
is bad and having one used against you can be deadly.

But the real enemy in The Net was never the computer itself but rather the
complacent stupidity that gives way to technological ease. Just because
technology makes something a hundred times easier to accomplish is no reason to
not look upon it with a healthy dose of skepticism. After all, what if somebody
manages to gain control of the system and make it say what they want it to? Are
there any backups? Is there a defense?

The Net does manage to send a very clear message. We do need a national health
care plan. Insofar as a message that actually pertains to the plot, however,
you'll have to dig much deeper.

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"Baby... You're Elite": Hackers (Autumn, 1995)
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Starring Jonny Lee Miller, Angelina Jolie, Fisher Stevens
United Artists

Review by Thee Joker

If you're waiting for me to rip this film to shreds and then burn it, you can
just turn the page because that's not going to happen...entirely.

There are going to be obvious comparisons between this film and The Net, both
because of subject matter and because of the release dates. I would have to say
that Hackers blows The Net out of the water. It is much more accurate and it
portrays hackers in a pretty positive light. However it still needs some work.

The problem with making a film about a subculture is that everyone in that
culture will find obvious flaws in it, such as the overbearing computer
graphics. So we need to skip the fact that there are inaccuracies as far as
hackers are concerned and focus on the film as a piece of entertainment.

First off, we should discuss the actors' performance. They did really well,
given what they had to work with. Jonny Lee Miller plays Dade (aka Zero Cool
and Crash Override) with a kinda cool that makes me think that he's seen too
many Tom Cruise movies with the way that he smiles at just the right time. The
fact that he is a British actor and speaks with a flawless American accent also
heightens my opinion of him. Angelina Jolie is great as Kate Libby (Acid Burn),
and strikingly beautiful in the role of the tomboy trying to fit in with the
male-dominated world of hackers. Fisher Stevens (yes, the Indian guy from Short
Circuit) as the antagonist hacker "The Plague" is humorous, pointed, and
altogether ferret-like. His hair looks like a wig, though, and he rides an old
school Powell Peralta Mike McGill in the film (time for a new deck buddy). He
looks like a vampire in a Mel Brooks remake of Dracula.

The rest of the supporting cast is played by Jesse Bradford in the role of
Joey, a hacker in search of a handle, Matthew Lillard as Cereal Killer whom you
may recognize from Serial Mom, Laurence Mason as Lord Nikon, due to his
photographic memory, who was also in The Crow and True Romance, and Renoly
Santiago as Phantom Phreak, the self-proclaimed "King of NYNEX." Last but not
least is Academy Award Nominee Lorraine Bracco in the role of The Plague's
girlfriend Margo. All of the supporting actors have been well cast in their
respective roles, especially Lillard, whose character's real name is Emmanuel
Goldstein. (Yes, this was on purpose and the resemblance is frightening.)

From the beginning, the film sports some great, albeit unrealistic, computer
graphics provided by Research Arts, The Magic Camera Company, Matte World
Digital, The Moving Picture Company, and GSE. The shots of the inside of the
Gibson Super Computer look like an ad for Intel Inside though. There is also a
video game sequence that was provided by Sony. If you treat them as a glamorous
Hollywood money thing they won't bother you so much.

Now for the pros and cons. The film is engaging and the plot moves along
steadily up until the ending. Ah yes, the ending... If any of you ever pick up
a woman (especially a female hacker) by saying "Baby... you're Elite," I'll
give you my first-born. The ending, in a word, sucks. It almost blew the whole
movie for me. Almost. Other than the ending I enjoyed the film, although there
were times that I was forced to laugh at it rather that having it make me
laugh. For one, the way that the word  elite  was tossed around only goes to
show that the word has now come to mean nothing except to codes kids on IRC.

The way that Emmanuel's name was used was comical but will be only to hackers,
or to anyone who catches the 1984 reference in the film. The use of a red box
in this film was great since they showed it being used as well as instructing
viewers on how to make a simple one. (In an apparent concession to phone
companies, however, real red box tones are not used.) It would have been wild
if Radio Shack had a little product placement but thankfully they didn't.
However, Apple Computers has product placement all throughout the movie (just
like in The Net), including the see-through laptop that The Plague gives to
Dade, as does Coca-Cola (including one really long shot of Dade in the kitchen
of his apartment at the table with a two liter bottle in center frame). Aside
from these I didn't see any other blatant product placing.

The makers of this film did a good job of not playing up the recent enlargement
of the public's interest in the sport of rollerblading. After I saw the trailer
I was sure that all this film was going to be was Hackers on Blades but it was
never emphasized in any way; they just used them as a means to increase their
mobility during the crucial moments, like the chase between the hackers and the
Secret Service.

While Hackers was not made for the hacker community in particular, it does
score some points with me for several reasons. The hackers were portrayed in a
positive light for once. The only character in the film that slams hackers at
all was Agent Richard Gill from the Secret Service and he not only gets his
throughout the film as the subject of a hacking duel between Dade and Kate, but
he has egg on his face when the Secret Service finds out they arrested the
wrong people.

Most of the terminology was accurate or close to it even if the graphics and
operating systems weren't. The word "cyberspace" wasn't used once.

The musical score is pretty cool techno/house albeit commercialized. Urban
Dance Squad has a scene where they play live. The costumes are cool, kind of a
clubesque sport biker blend, and the hackers are, accurately, a cross-section
of people and not one-sided Hollywood cutouts.

The plot moves along rather well and is good up until the aforementioned
ending. United Artists did a good job of turning Rafael Moreu's story into a
workable script with the exception of a few cheesy lines. The subject matter is
also topical given the recent arrests of Bernie S. and Kevin Mitnick for what
most people consider to be crimes that were blown way out of proportion. The
Secret Service is portrayed accurately too, from what several of my friends who
have been raided tell me.

To make a long story short, The Plague gets cured, boy gets girl, hacker gets
handle, everyone is acquitted, and the world is safer for democracy.

So, is it worth your $8? I think so...especially given the alternative choices.
Hackers will probably raise a lot of consciousness as to what we do so, as
always, watch your ass.