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.
