The Net #BlastFromThePast (Released July 1995)

Available on YouTube or Amazon Prime

The Net. Mid 90s. AOL chat rooms were opening new worlds, floppy disks were still king, and most of us thought the Net was a novelty for tech nerds. Then along came The Net with Sandra Bullock at the height of her stardom (just off Speed), and it asked a question no one wanted to hear. What happens when someone who controls the pipes can also erase you?

Sandra Bullock plays Angela Bennett, a systems analyst whose quiet life is erased by forces who do not just break into accounts but control the machinery behind the scenes.

It is not really about clever hacks. It is about the terrifying idea that when one person or one company has the keys to everything including databases, platforms, records, and reputations, they can silence you by making the world believe you never existed. Watching Angela try to prove she is real feels less like a 90s thriller now and more like a parable about consolidation of power.

I see Elon Musk all over this film. That alone should send you to watch it.

Cultural impact? I do not think The Net got the attention it deserved. Critics shrugged, audiences filed it away, and we moved on. Rewatching it now feels almost chilling. What once read as paranoid tech fantasy reads as an early warning about what happens when too much control lives in too few hands. If this film came out today it would be headlines. The fact that someone saw the possibilities thirty years ago and we were not interested says more about us than it does about the movie.

PS... I watched it this past weekend, and I promise it holds up.

-- Christine Merser