The Wayback Machine: Sandra Bullock’s The Net Still Holds Up
Skipping over the segment about how her mother has Alzheimers (ahem), we get to the beginning of the movie itself. We learn that Bullock is planning a vacation, and we see her select her seat on the plane from a website with voiceover. (-4) (Compare this to American’s crappy 1998 website.)
A knock at the door, and FedEx arrives with a package.
Where to begin? First of all, am I the only one who remembers how computer games in that day and age came on not one but about a dozen floppy disks? Games with far less audio and graphics than the bitchin’ Mozart’s Ghost? (-3) Why is this guy shipping a website around on a floppy disk? (-1) Why does the Houston Electric Utility have a graphics-intense website with a log-in? (-2) Why does she have a task list that runs on the WordPerfect engine? (-1)
(That little pi symbol in the corner, if the movie came out today, would almost certainly become a common in-joke among web designers. Geeky as I was, I added a tongue-in-cheek pi to my website after seeing the movie. Clicking it led to, among other things, a review of the Waffle House.)
Moving right along, her friend’s plane crashes (somehow because of the net) (-1), she heads to Mexico, she meets a guy named Devlin. (Angela! Devlin! Get it? Did I mention Angela works for Cathedral Software?) He turns out to be a bad guy, who has used what he knows about Angela to seem like the perfect catch – plus he has what Angela calls a “nice piece of hardware,” a Mac laptop that looks like it weighs about 42 pounds. They sleep together, she finds a gun, she escapes, she crashes a boat. None of this is related to the Internet, and therefore it is boring. (She does tell Devlin that she does “beta testing” which he, pretending to be a hacker, says is “way over his head.”) (-5)
She wakes up in a hospital in Mexico, and asks the doctor there if he’s seen the disk which contained Mozart’s Ghost. She describes what a disk is: it’s plastic and square. In Mexico, doctors weren’t familiar with computers in 1995, it seems. (-3) The disk was ruined. However, she is handed Devlin’s wallet, which has inside a card with a password on the back. This is what hackers do – they write down their passwords and keep them in their wallets. (-1)
She has no ID, so she goes to the consulate. There, she is issued a new visa, but with the wrong name. Here is the form she is shown.
Please note the “RAW DATA” box. That’s where the “raw data” about Angela is kept – unlike where it says her name and address, which is apparently somehow encrypted. (-2)
She goes home, it’s not hers anymore, she steals a cell phone, Devlin has an associate traingulate her position using cell signals. (+2! They can actually do that!)
NEXT: An affair with Dennis Miller!
This is an opinion piece. The views expressed in this article are those of just the author.
