At first blush, the idea of signing up as a reviewer for a popular DVD Web site is exciting. You get to write about movies! You get some free screener DVDs! What a great way to share your unique viewpoint and build your collection at the same time. But there comes a moment in any reviewer’s career when the shine comes off the apple. Mine came the day The Net: The Unabomber, LSD and the Internet arrived in my mailbox.

It took a little while to realize what had happened to me. Kind of like the delayed stress associated with cases of extreme shock. The disc looked interesting enough. The cover has a spooky criminal sketch artist’s rendering of Unabomber Ted Kaczynski, overlaid with some Matrix-like binary code and a cool sounding title. This is right up my alley, I thought. Eagerly I grabbed my Big Book of Conspiracies, put on my tinfoil hat and plopped down in front of my home theater to give it a spin.

Was I greeted with a gripping, mind-expanding thesis that stripped bare my preconceptions about life, technology, politics and the nature of the information revolution? I have no doubt in my mind that the makers of The Net wanted to deliver me just that, but the sad fact is that this so-called documentary is about the most muddled, un-engaging and sleep inducing “film” I’ve seen in over twenty-five years as a cinephile and conspiracy buff.

The basic underpinnings of The Net are these: the information revolution, as realized in the Internet, is based on experiments in mind expansion by pioneering sixties revolutionaries like Ken Kesey, Timothy Leary and The Merry Pranksters. These people and others were able to synthesize a kind of dispassionate objectivity through LSD, psychological methods developed in concert with deep cover CIA operatives and the omni-directional linkage of logic, morality and instantaneous communication offered by connected networks of computers. They then attempted to foment a broad-based intellectual insurgency against the establishment stronghold on physical and metaphorical wealth with Ted Kaczynski as a sort of Nostradamus-like profit of this burgeoning awakening of the collective unconscious.

Say what?

Exactly.

The Net is a tangled mess of ideas, paranoid fantasies, revisionist histories and flat out insanity that touches on all those subjects and dozens of others as it rambles from interview to interview, scene to scene and theme to theme. There is no linear narrative or thematic structure to the film – and not in an intentional way. Rather, the chaotic nature of the piece seems to be a direct reflection of German filmmaker Lutz Dammbeck's own inner turmoil. Or maybe something’s lost in translation? About half of the film is in German with English subtitles. The rest is in English. And you thought it couldn’t get any more muddled.

Sound and Vision
The Net was filmed on consumer grade DV cameras and edited (I assume) on the Apple iBook that figures so prominently in the film. That should give you a reasonable idea of how it looks and sounds. But, since you’re probably going to take my advice and avoid this disc like the plague, it doesn’t really matter what it looks and sounds like, now does it?

Extras
Additional Interviews with John Brockman, Stewart Brand and Paul Garrin. – The main feature was never able to coalesce an understandable thesis so it should come as little surprise that these three brief interviews do little to lift the fog. However, Jim Brockman is probably the most interesting person in the entire film so you may want to check out what he has to say. No, strike that. Don’t waste your time.

Preview Trailers for Tribulation 99 and Experiments in Terror – Bonus trailers for two more Other Cinema releases. Both of these trailers are 1,000 times better than the main feature, especially the one for Experiments in Terror, which features more groovy ‘60s psychedelic imagery than it does anything terrifying.

Conclusion
It took no less than five tries to get through The Net. It sat on my shelf mocking me for months on end. Every few weeks I’d get up the willpower to try and watch the whole thing and every time I’d be thwarted by The Net’s numbing power. I did eventually get through it and I’m here to offer you the opportunity to learn from my ordeal and avoid The Net at all costs. Has DIMP ever given a film NO pants? Though I’m sorely tempted to do so, I’m giving The Net 1/2 pant due to the fact that the disc didn’t break my DVD player. It worked exactly like a DVD should… only without any entertainment or educational value whatsoever. Watch at your own risk.