Thursday Movie Picks: Technological/Media Mysteries

 

For the 36th week of 2022 as part of Wandering Through the Shelves' Thursday Movie Picks as part of mystery month. We go into the world of technological and media mysteries as it play into the world where new things are emerging or set in a futuristic world that play into new mysterious elements. Here are my three picks as they’re all based on the early days of the internet and were made in the 1990s:

1. The Net

Starring Sandra Bullock as a system analyst who liked to go online and chat with other people where she meets a smuggler on vacation and things go wrong. Even as someone else took her identity as it involves a lot of government conspiracies and all sorts of shit. It is a film of its time considering the technological limitations it was dealing with but Bullock’s performance is what makes the film work despite its many flaws.

2. Hackers

Another film that was a product of its time in terms of some of the tech language and people had to use to get on the internet. It does a remain a cult classic in terms of its stakes that involves a securities agent trying to steal money with an executive only for that scheme to be discovered by a group of young hackers. The cast that features Angelina Jolie, Jonny Lee Miller, Jesse Bradford, Matthew Lillard, Laurence Mason, and Renoly Santiago as the titular characters with a supporting cast that includes Fisher Stevens, Lorraine Bracco, Alberta Watson, Wendell Pierce, Penn Jillette, Felicity Huffman, and Marc Anthony all offer something while it has one of the most underrated film soundtracks of the 1990s that helped introduce audiences to electronic music.

3. Enemy of the State

An underrated film from Tony Scott that is about a lawyer who discovers a conspiracy and cover-up involving NSA agents is a film that has a lot of thrills and intrigue but also some incredible work from Will Smith and Gene Hackman. The film obviously takes a few cues from Francis Ford Coppola’s 1974 film The Conversation that starred Hackman yet it also involves the world of the internet and its growth at that time as it does serve like a modern update of Coppola’s film but it is also a film that can be part of a great list of films involving surveillance and intrigue.

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