It's pretty clever, I suppose, the way the movie presents Angela as though she hasn't left her apartment in six years and with a mother suffering from Alzheimer's (and thus not able to help identify the real Angela later), but it's pretty hard to believe that not a single person in the office where she worked noticed that Angela started being a completely different person. Angela Bennett has had her digital identity stolen and replaced with that of Ruth Marx, who has a lengthy police record and who thus takes over Angela's identity. Probably the most interesting thing in the movie now is the computers, such as the massive laptops with the tiny screens, the indispensable floppy disks which are now almost nonexistent, the graphics, etc. The Manchurian Candidate originally played off the fears instilled in people by the recently ended Cold War, while The Net, a much less potent thriller, suggests the scary possibilities of a world in which we are so inextricably connected to computers. Like The Manchurian Candidate back in the 1960s (and again in less than a week from this writing), The Net plays on the popular fears of the society in which it is released. It's not only like a source of nourishment but her connection to the world and the establishment and maintenance of her identity.

Sandra Bullock plays Angela Bennett, a lonely computer analyst who is so connected to her computer that she sits on the beach in Mexico, on her first vacation in six years, with her laptop on her lap. Now it's a feature so obsolete that it may as well never have been there. I remember being amazed at that little tiny flap at the bottom of the phone, as thin as a credit card and yet able to pick up your voice and transmit it through the air.

Less than a decade ago, there was this completely different technological world, a world of pagers, floppy disks, dial-up modems (which are as obsolete as typewriters), and gigantic brick-like cell phones.

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