Tuesday

By coincidence, the day after I saw Firewall, the early 90s film The Net was on television. I thought this was too good an opportunity to miss to compare these two movies about technology. They both deal with the way computers can manipulate our identity as easily as they can create them, or how they can be used to commit any kind of crime merely by hacking security systems. In Firewall Harrison Ford, the head of on-line security for a bank, has his family kidnapped and accounts hijacked in order to force him to transfer money to the criminals. In comparison, Sandra Bullock is a software engineer in The Net who has her identity deleted when she finds something suspicious in a program she is examining. The differences in the computers are astonishing, and almost embarrassing. The first thing that struck me was how poor The Net really was, when I remember when I was younger I liked it. The innovation of using the internet as a plot device is about the only interesting thing here in an otherwise mundane movie. As for Firewall, I can't say that it's much better. Take away the context, and you're left with a fairly dry narrative. Harrison Ford seems to put little effort into the movie (as far as I can tell), although Paul Bettany is reasonably frightening as the lead kidnapper. One interesting development between the two (possibly helped by the first) is how the internet user has turned from geek to hero.