From ‘The Net' to ‘M3GAN,' real-life technological fears rule the movies

Boston Globe

11-07-2025

Several familiar movies also wouldn't exist without technology-based terror creeping into our daily lives. Just this year, we've had The Entity, the evil AI program bent on world domination, in '
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M3gan and Cady (Violet McGraw) in "M3GAN 2.0" directed by Gerard Johnstone.
Universal Pictures
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The same technology forced the return of M3GAN, the killer robot. She was rebooted in '
Consider how these new movies are commenting on the unwanted infiltration
of programs like ChatGPT and Google's AI search into our lives. It's like a plague we can't escape, a rise of the machines prophesized by Mr. 'King of the World' himself, James Cameron, back in 1984's 'The Terminator' and its apocalyptic 1991 sequel, 'Terminator 2: Judgment Day.'
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Arnold Schwarzenegger stars as The Terminator in "Terminator 2: Judgment Day," director James Cameron's 1991 sequel to his 1984 film "The Terminator."
Artisan Home Entertainment
Hell, Google's AI overview search results will tell you I gave three stars to 'A Minecraft Movie,' a film I did not review. It has also been inaccurate about movies I did review. That scares the hell out of me — you can't even get the right information to yell at me about — but I suppose I deserve it for my contributions to the tech world.
That fear of online misrepresentation is not new, and it was the basis of a beloved film that turns 30 this year.
Back in July 1995, Sandra Bullock scored a big hit with 'The Net,' the computer-based thriller that was her third success in a row. Hot off of 'Speed' and 'While You Were Sleeping,' Bullock was cast as virus expert/hacker Angela Bennett. Bennett discovers a dangerous plot to infiltrate the systems of governments and banks to ensure maximum chaos. This information forces her to go on the run after an assassination attempt.
Directed by 'Rocky' producer, Irwin Winkler, 'The Net' earned over $110 million worldwide on a $22 million budget. However, I was not one of the movie's bigger fans. I'd been in tech for exactly eight years by this point (I started in July 1987), and I found one particular plot point so dopey that it sank the entire movie for me.
Still, Bennett was a believable programmer — we're all somewhat neurotic, potentially compulsive, and always paranoid about what technology can do because we understand the danger. The HBO show 'Silicon Valley' and David Fincher's Mark Zuckerberg movie, 'The Social Network' (which turns 15 this year), are two of the best examples of what living and working with programmers is like. I became a social creature as a defense mechanism, but if you want to see my true, misanthropic I.T. personality, look at
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Sandra Bullock stars as computer systems analyst Angela Bennett in "The Net."
Sony Pictures
You wouldn't want to follow any of the characters I just mentioned, but who doesn't love '90s era Sandy Bullock? 'The Net' puts her in danger courtesy of a virus-filled 3½-inch floppy disk. (Remember when your potential destruction was, at max, 1.44 megabytes?) Very powerful men want this disk, and Jack Devlin, a dangerous man played by Jeremy Northam, will kill for it.
Angela's sexual dalliance with Devlin, which the film should have avoided, is the only reason why her execution gets botched. But it sets the stage for her real identity to be stolen and erased from existence. Through plot points too detailed to explain, she becomes Ruth Marx, a criminal targeted by the LAPD. It's up to Angela to clear her name and figure out who's behind the dastardly plot to control the world.
The only person who believes her is played by Dennis Miller, yet another reminder of why the 1990s was a bad decade. At least 'The Net' stokes your nostalgia for AOL-like screens, ICQ-style chat rooms, and garish HTML-based graphics. TELNET and WHOIS programs are also employed onscreen.
The film asks questions about how safe your computer's security programs are, whether your identity can be stolen, and how easy it is for people to believe everything they see on a computer screen without question. Though these real world concerns are still prevalent today, they were much newer in 1995, making 'The Net' a paranoid thriller for its era. They could have easily called this 'Three Days of the Cursor.'
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David Lightman (Matthew Broderick), a Seattle high school student, demonstrates his home computer's ability to alter Jennifer's (Ally Sheedy) school grades in the 1983 film "War Games."
MGM/United Artists
'The Net' is far from the only tech-based movie to reflect the concerns of its time. The 1980s were full of films that cast a wary eye on computers for a variety of reasons that, to this day, still exist. Take 1983's Matthew Broderick classic, 'WarGames,' a film that, like many other films of the decade, was steeped in worrying about a nuclear war between the United States and Russia.
The bigger issue in John Badham's film was how easy it was for Broderick's character, David, to dial into the government's computer (remember modems, folks?) and engage with its primitive AI-based military system. David thinks he's playing a game called 'Global Thermonuclear War.' The system thinks otherwise.
A scene from 1982's "Tron."
Walt Disney Productions
The year before, there was Disney's cult classic 'Tron,' which is about the parental fear of kids getting hooked on arcade games. It's also about getting sucked into a video game to battle — you guessed it — an artificial intelligence in a virtual world. This AI loads up government and business programs to make itself more powerful. I bet it would say I gave 'Megalopolis' four stars, too.
For the romantics, there's 1984's 'Electric Dreams,' where an architect uses a primitive form of AI to help him design bricks. The program not only becomes sentient, it falls in love with the architect's love interest, Virginia Madsen, and tries to wreck their relationship. Nowadays, as in Spike Jonze's 'Her,' and many real-life stories, it's the guy falling in love with the fake paramour he created inside the computer.
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Lest I forget, there's the HAL 9000. I'm not sure what he represented back in 1968, but I have an idea. I'll bet HAL was a warning that computers were going to take over and do some very nasty things because their logic doesn't allow for the moral complexities of the human brain. But leave it to Stanley Kubrick to be the only director of a movie in this piece to give his artificial intelligence character a soul.
Soul or not, computers are still evil. So we're doomed!
See you in the Matrix!
Odie Henderson is the Boston Globe's film critic.