The Net

Sandra Bullock, Dennis Miller and Jeremy Northam star in this hit thriller about a computer expert whose life is "erased" by a computer conspiracy. A freelance software analyst, Angela Bennett, is inadvertently drawn into a dangerous conspiracy when a client asks her to de-bug a CD-ROM game. Soon the client turns up dead and Angela is next on the hit-list. After the assassins obliterate her official identity, Angela realizes hers is not the only life being destroyed on the Net. Like the best Hitchcock, THE NET builds tension to unbearable heights until "this edge of your seat nail-biter explodes with suspense. Sandra Bullock is sensational." (Jeanne Wolf, Jeanne Wolf's Hollywood)

The Net, the first of Hollywood's big cyberthrillers of the mid-1990s, was also the most successful, thanks in large part to the natural appeal of star Sandra Bullock. Still riding high from Speed and While You Were Sleeping, Bullock plays a computer expert victimized by sinister cyberforces who steal her identity for reasons unknown. It's a clever combination of high-tech paranoia and Hitchcockian references (including Jeremy Northam as a romantic stranger named Devlin, after Cary Grant in Notorious). Film historians may look back someday on films like this--Roger Ebert calls them "hacksploitation"--to see what they reveal about our society's reaction to the increasing role of technology in our lives, just as we now study the fears of Communism and the atom bomb reflected in films of the 1950s. Dennis Miller and Diane Baker costar. --Jim Emerson