The Wayback Machine: Sandra Bullock’s The Net Still Holds Up

Philip BumpOct 12th, 2009, 5:18 pm

The next scene is great. Bullock walks in, passing a poster for a trade show while the office PA system announces where the Cathedral Software both is at the trade show. I hope that info comes in handy! She then finds an empty desk, and sits down.

Here’s how I assigned points.
Custom business OS: -1
Remote keystroke logging by any user of any user: -6
Choosing which user to log via graphic floor plan: -2
Accessing the chat system of your international super-hacker organization from work: +2
Using the code name ‘ANGEL’ to refer to Angela: -1
Allowing any user to set off fire alarms on any floor: -3
The evil hackers (“Praetorian”) not alphabetizing their list of targets: -1
Tracing an IP by isolating each component of the address one at a time in dramatic fashion, using a blinking, beeping interface: -2
Saving everything you’ve learned as a Word document: -50
Saving it to disk, instead of uploading it somewhere: -1

Angela discovers that the evil genius behind the various global hacking escapades that I haven’t mentioned is actually the same guy trying to sell powerful anti-hacking technology. That’s your plot, completed.

Angela affects her escape by blending into a, you guessed it, AIDS march.

(+5 for the ‘Healthcare is a RIGHT’ sign) During the chase, all I kept thinking was: how can the Net be used to catch her? Use the Net!

She heads, of course, to the trade show, which was obviously filmed at a MacWorld in Moscone Center. Companies you can spot in the background include Kensington, MacPilot Raster, Ducorp CD-ROMs, 4D, Symantec. People are walking around carrying MacUser bags – and this gem:

Flying toasters! It all made me kind of nostalgic. (+3 for authenticity)

At the Cathedral booth (how’d she find it?!), she uploads what she found to the FBI. To do so, she somehow logs in to the FBI email server. (-2 for lax security at the FBI, -2 for not understanding how email works) Devlin catches her and tells her it doesn’t matter, because he can just hack into the FBI and erase the message. He seems unconcerned about hacking into the FBI from the floor of a crowded trade show. (-1)

However! Angela has switched disks, and now the bug from the Wolfenstein game is in the disk drive, the one where if you hit escape, it wipes out your whole system! Devlin hits escape. Somehow the mere presence of the disk in the drive triggers a mainframe meltdown, because now they’re somehow in the mainframe. The fake Angela from Cathedral says, “Goddamn it, you’re in the mainframe! It’s eating through Gregg’s [the main bad guy] entire system, Devlin! Do something!”

-100 for all of this.

A chase, and the two bad guys die. Shortly before the credits roll, we hear Daniel Schorr relay that the main bad guy was arrested. Everything is fixed, including Angela’s life. Her mother, though, still has a crippling, chronic mental illness.

The end. And the final score: -237, with 257 negative points and 20 positives. Write that down somewhere.

Thanks so much to the person who recommended I review this. Having put in several hours on this project, I can say that this movie and its 30% rating on Rotten Tomatoes is certainly worth such an investment.

-100 for my life.

Philip Bump is a technology and communications consultant in New York City who will be writing an occasional column for Mediaite about the intersection of history and the Internet called “The Wayback Machine” (inspiration here). Follow him on Twitter here.