The Net

Action, Thriller

Sandra Bullock	Angela Bennett/Ruth Marx
Ray McKinnon	Dale Hessman
Jeremy Northam	Jack Devlin
Diane Baker	Mrs. Bennett
Wendy Gazelle	Ruth Marx
Robert Gossett	Ben Phillips
Ken Howard	Michael Bergstrom
Dennis Miller	Dr. Alan Champion
Daniel Schorr	WNN Anchor
Margo Winkler	Mrs. Raines

Director	Irwin Winkler; Winkler
Producer	Rob Cowan; Irwin Winkler
Writer	John D. Brancato; Michael Ferris; John Brancato
Cinematography	Jack N. Green
Musician	Mark Isham; Jeff Rona

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