Yesterday we looked at how Steve Jobs flopped at the box office — but it’s hardly a disaster of filmmaking. What’s the worst movie made with tech as a major plot element?
By standards of Good Movies, Steve Jobs has a lot going for it: snappy, Aaron Sorkin-rich dialogue, excellent acting from a top-notch cast, sleek production values. I may take issue with the sappy ending, but Steve Jobs is not a bad film about technology.
A bad film about technology is 1995’s The Net, starring Sandra Bullock as a systems analyst out to expose dastardly cybervillains. You don’t remember The Net? A “cyber action thriller” made in the early days of online, the movie played on all our worst fears about the scary newfangled Internet. There are cyberterrorists, conspiracies, erased identities, terribly important floppy disks, and Sandra ordering pizza online from pizza.net. Welcome to the future.
The Net isn’t just laughable by today’s technological standards, it’s purposely fear-mongering about what awaits unwitting web users. “The absolute worst film ever about the Internet is the one whose brain trust couldn’t come up with a better title than The Net,” wrote PC World Magazine’s Christopher Null.
But there have been a lot of dumb cinematic spectacles with technology as a central theme, whether they’re starring moronic hackers or hackneyed robots. What’s the worst movie you can come up with?