The Net
Hey, Do You Remember...?
Christopher Schrader
4.8 • 676 Ratings
🗓️ 9 January 2015
⏱️ 87 minutes
🧾️ Download transcript
Summary
So this was a first... a movie none of us had ever seen prior to this episode. Donna had been hearing for years that it was completely insane and thought it might be fun to look back at what our perception of the internet was circa 1995. The only problem is that even twenty years ago, no one was taking The Net seriously.
It did manage to make a handful of very accurate predictions about where this technology was headed, but for the most part its an aggressive assault on common sense. That's not what made this it such a chore to get through though. It's biggest problem is that it's a thriller that isn't thrilling. It's a boring mess that spends the majority of its running time spinning its wheels.
Topics include: what scared us about the internet when we were kids, certain elements the writers could have borrowed from films like Vertigo or Rear Window that would have made Angela's dilemma more compelling, how a fundamental misunderstanding of Internet 101 completely invalidates what the villains are after here, the importance of a second opinion when it comes to major medical diagnosis, why this group of terrorists feels the need to leave a calling card on their super secret web page, the endless parade of limp and repetitive action scenes, the fact that the bad guys had nothing to fear from Angela until they started chasing her, and much much more!
Transcript
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| 0:00.0 | Hey, do you remember the Met? |
| 0:07.0 | Hello and welcome to Hey Do You Remember, a show where we reminisce about a movie or TV series we grew up with, |
| 0:29.0 | then take off the rose-tinted glasses to see how it holds up. |
| 0:32.1 | I'm Chris. |
| 0:32.9 | I'm Donna. |
| 0:33.6 | And I'm Carlos. |
| 0:34.5 | And today we're revisiting The Net. |
| 0:52.7 | Yeah. And I'm Carlos. And today we're revisiting the Net. Any emerging technology is typically met with equal parts excitement and trepidation, |
| 0:57.8 | and as difficult as it might be for anyone born after 1990 to imagine, |
| 1:02.1 | there was a point in time when the internet was brand new. |
| 1:05.2 | In fact, when the net was released in the summer of 95, |
| 1:08.4 | only around 0.4% of the world's population was online. For comparison |
| 1:13.1 | sake, today it's 42%. So as naive or unfounded, as a lot of the film's plot points seem |
| 1:19.3 | now, it's interesting to note how prescient and ahead of the curve other aspects of it turned |
| 1:23.8 | out to be. It's a mid-90 spin on the familiar wrong man-accus storyline, as well as an |
| 1:29.0 | early star vehicle for Sandra Bullock. And although it turned a substantial profit at the box office, |
| 1:34.1 | it received mixed to poor reviews and was largely forgotten just a few years later. |
| 1:38.8 | That didn't stop Columbia Pictures from trying to squeeze blood from this stone, though. |
| 1:42.9 | There was a remake in the form of a TV |
| 1:44.6 | series that ran for one season on the USA Network in 1998. There was also a sequel called The Net 2.0 |
| 1:51.3 | that went straight to video in 2006. I'll bet that's new information to 99% of you, |
| 1:57.0 | which should tell you everything you need to know about how quickly we moved on from this |
... |
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