Tayloriona Although I seem to have had higher expectations than I thought, the movie is super entertaining.

Erica Derrick By the time the dramatic fireworks start popping off, each one feels earned.

Geraldine The story, direction, characters, and writing/dialogue is akin to taking a tranquilizer shot to the neck, but everything else was so well done.

Scarlet The film never slows down or bores, plunging from one harrowing sequence to the next.

Polaris_DiB The term "post-human" refers to the postmodern status of the human being transcending beyond the boundaries of biology and genetics and into the cyborg reality of ultimate reliance on technology. That reliance is translated as more of a symbiotic relationship than that of an addiction or psychological dependency. Information technology is at the forefront of analysis into post-human critics and thinkers, as humanity has seemingly willingly jacked itself in to a hive construct with mass communications and productions of personal computers, cellphones, and other networking devices. Front and center, really, of all that is the Internet. Tied in to the Internet is its industrial-military beginnings. And where most of humanity seems to generally accept these new ways of living with only cursory glances as to its implications and consequences, for the most part there is still an undercurrent of unease running under and through the signals shot around our atmosphere. For some people, this unease is the source of a desperate need to look at these technologies and ask the question of what they are doing to us, instead of for us. This movie, The Net, is simply the best documentary on that vein I've yet seen.What this movie is essentially is Lutz Dammbeck dialoging with Ted Kaszynsky and his victims. Center to that is the relationship between technophobia and technophilia, the integrated relationship between that technology and contemporary history, cyberpunk mentality, and our new way of viewing ourselves as information carriers as opposed to psychobiological vassals. All of these concepts provide the bigger picture. The details are disturbing, but still open to interpretation. Dammbeck is not interested in placing a specific value into his documentary, but traveling around the nation and letting the values speak for themselves. He even has a woman narrate his role, kind of like Chris Marker in Sans Soleil. All along he keeps a written correspondence to Kascynsky, which makes for an interesting character study in and of itself.A good point is made within the movie that as technology changes, our relationships and perspectives of ourselves change with it. This is meant to detail the reason why the Internet has interdigitated itself into our lives, but it also should be understood to mean that these ideas might justifiably change. Who knows what the future holds for us, really? The issue at stake is, as always, do you use technology as a tool, or a weapon? --PolarisDiB

placebotonic This documentary nailed me to the seat, because it explores the social links with great care and shows just enough for me to get the big picture. Kaczynski, no matter what you think of him, no matter what his victims think of him, has a very, very valid point. Philosophically, his goal could only have been to deconstruct society, make the links fluid, then reconstruct it in another way. It is only sad that he thought he had the power to do so, since the society, the whole world works in a uniform way, we are all, with very few exceptions driven by instinct through mind to obtain wealth, status, partner, family, luxury, security, and this is intertwined in such a way, that the common denominator is simply: mo'better. More and better, more of better, better and more of it. This inevitably means that everyone will be inclined to actively and passively seek shortcuts, most come by means of new inventions, technology. This is the driving force behind technology and an individual, or even a group of individuals, cannot possibly challenge that. It strikes me a bit odd that one of Kaczynski's victims dismissed his theories simply because he is a murderer. The difference between him and a soldier who kills is that the soldier has a mandate from the state to do so. Both are widow/orphan makers, but only one was allowed by the state to do so. Is he therefore not a murderer simply because the state allowed him to kill?A historic fact is that former USSR and Nazi Germany were quite equal in ideology, but the reason we don't hear that is because Russia has been too powerful to be challenged like that. Because of politics, Russian holocaust of Ukrainians, for instance, was overlooked. It's the state that decides what you may do, what you may know. You see, things aren't always black or white and this movie is trying to show just that.If you're thinking about the world, where we're going and just want your eyes to be able to perceive more, watch this documentary.

K2nsl3r The Whole is greater than the sum of its parts; the System will survive a couple of loose parts and weak links. Arpanet, as the precursor to the Internet, was designed to withstand localized damage. The Global Economy, too, has survived the terrorism by Al-Qaeda as well as by the Unabomber. Likewise, this film, as a film ABOUT the Internet and the Global Economy, withstands the critiquing of its weaker attributes.The subject matter of this film is the Brave New World of technological utopia, a Mega-System of sorts. This story entails systematics, globalization, technological rationalization and the paranoid fantasies of this world's discontents. Human behaviour becomes a fabrication of control mechanisms, and in such a world nothing is feared more than a total lack of control, i.e. arbitrary terrorism, such as that of The Unabomber. The ingenuity of this film, on a purely intellectual level, is the way it connects the dots between The Internet, Esalen Institute, New York Times, M.I.T., Henry David Thoreau, Montana and Ted Kaczynski. In a word, this film weaves an intriguing Web about the Web.One shouldn't be put off by the problematic morals of this film. This film, as a document, is too important to be dismissed as sensationalism or misguided hero-worship. For one, Dammbeck puts Unabomber in a context where one is not made to agree with his radical (and borderline insane) ideas, but instead is given a good sample of the institutional background of the professor-turned-killer, forcing a transition from the merely personal and anecdotal into the realm of History and Causation. What, we are asked, is the relationship between fundamental mathematics and the paranoid fantasies of Gödel and Kaczynski? And what if there is a linkage between the CIA-Army behavioural experiments of the 1950's and 60's and the very real madness of Unabomber? What, after all is said and done, is the role of individual responsibility in a world governed by trends, fluctuations, computer technology and economic mergers? Lutz Dammbeck's documentary is a fascinating voyage into the dark underbelly of the American Dream (to paraphrase Hunter S. Thompson). The film maker slices through a number of interweaving threads in search of something intangible yet real, something to cut through the virtual. In fact, the film may be accused of being somewhat incoherent in its production, because the internal logic of the film follows too closely the subjective voyage of the director (with mind maps and internal dialogues given precedence to the voice of the interviewees). That said, subjectivity in documentary film-making can be a strength, and the director takes full advantage of the opening up of new doorways into strange, dark alleys of underreported American history. He is bounced around from door to door, from person to person, from topic to topic. The viewer is in for a roller coaster ride, both dazzling and dizzying.The film maker exhibits clear signs of ignorance, arrogance, confusion, banality and moral ambivalence - all in varying proportions. Still, the end result manages to be inclusive yet not over-effuse, and, for the viewer, the combinatory effect of topics and interviewees boils down to an altogether charming and fascinating experience. It is hard to say what lessons to learn from this film, but one is at least given a glimpse of the full compass of Genius on the moral scale from the Humanitarian to the Criminally Insane. It is less than comfortable to find out that the difference between a Benefactory Visionary and an Evil Genius is a thin red line...

Moritz Muehlenhoff "Das Netz" seemed like an interesting subject matter in the first glance, but the movie is fundamentally flawed by the fact that the author has no profound knowledge about the topic. He's giving obscure statements about the internet being "an agglomeration of machines with indefinite size and power" and his not even partial knowledge about mathematics (and especially Gödel's theories) are hilarious. The scenes in which the director is drawing the "big picture" are completely pointless and it's extremely rude to confront a victim of Kaczynsnki (who lost an arm in a bombing) with the statement that he'd been a victim of a legitimate fight against the "system".