My favourite film aged 12: The Net
When interviewing an actor or director I admire, I’ve made it a personal mission to avoid sycophancy: I’m there for something resembling a business meeting, not a fan convention. I’m not cold, far from it, but I’m also not about to invite Noah Baumbach for cocktails so I can ramble on at him about how The Squid and the Whale spoke to my inner child of divorce. I know my place and I know theirs. But there was one time, back in 2013, when I simply couldn’t help myself.
I was at the Gravity junket interviewing Sandra Bullock, stuck with a thankless conveyor-belt slot, shuffled in for less than 10 minutes after waiting for more than three hours. She was as charming as I’d expected, based both on rumblings from within the industry and from the fondness I’d had for her as a child, when I had VHS copies of Speed and The Net on rotation for a solid year.
While the former remains a sturdy favourite and inarguably the better movie, it was the latter that jimmied its way further into my life, and in that clinical hotel room 18 years later words tumbled out of my mouth before I had the smarts to stop them. Our time was up and, as I waited for the footage of our interview, I splurged out some nonsense about what an integral film it had been to my 11-year-old self. She was politely enthused to hear it (or convincingly acted that way), telling me that it was a film ahead of its time, and, as I was ushered out of the room, I yelled something in agreement, a dumb comment about how radical it had been to see someone order pizza on a computer. (It really had been, though.)
It was a lapse, from film journalist to fanboy, but it was because the film really had been a key part of my life, for reasons that haven’t always been clear to me. Watching it again, 25 years after its release, I was struck by the many things about The Net that didn’t work (with less far-fetched hokeyness, it could have been a more chilling thriller) but more so I was rewarded by seeing the many aspects of it that did. As Bullock told me years later, the film really was quite astonishing in its forward-thinking view of the internet’s perils.
In 1995, my awareness of an online world was vague, as it was for most people. My main source of information was the big screen and within the space of a few months, I had seen both The Net and Hackers. While the latter, starring a young Angelina Jolie, was far zippier and lighter, the messages were similar: be careful.
In The Net, Bullock plays systems analyst Angela Bennett who finds herself stuck in a Hitchcockian nightmare partly of her own making. In the nascent internet, Angela has found a place to hide, a way to justify her loneliness as optional, retreating into a digital community far more welcoming