What '90s Movies Got Wrong About the Internet

Image via Complex Original

While you might argue that downloading your Twitter archive and reliving your embarrassing digital footprint is basically Time Travel, movies in the '90s really thought we'd be able to insert ourselves into virtual worlds and relive years of the past. Just ask the creators of The Thirteenth Floor.

Before Tinder, OKCupid or Grindr, there was email. You've Got Mail's iconic representation of dating in the digital age wasn't wrong, but it did imply that AOL would be our preferred method of communication for decades to come. Go ahead, log into your old AIM profile and see who's still online.

That actually might be kind of true, in some ways. But in Johnny Mnemonic, Keanu Reeves can carry “nearly 80 gigs of data” in his head in the year 2021. Meanwhile, in 2014, we can carry 64 gigabytes of data in our iPhones, and if we built a hard drive as big as our heads, we could probably hold hundreds of terabytes in there.

That's basically the plot to The Matrix.

If you've seen the 1992 adaptation of Stephen King's The Lawnmower Man, then you know that virtual reality games were a popular film trope in the early '90s. The plot of this story involves a man who is convinced by a scientist (played by Pierce Brosnan) to play a virtual reality game in order to make him "smarter." The subsequent video game is also surprisingly very difficult (as demonstrated by Abbi and Ilana).

Computer graphics have come such a long way since the '90s, as demonstrated by this still from The Lawnmower Man. This is probably definitely not what cybersex would look like today...

In the '90s, we needed dial-up! How else were people supposed to connect to the World Wide Web if they weren't physically wired to a modem? There was no such thing as wireless Internet, so of course in the movies, they wouldn't have imagined that we'd be able to connect to the Internet while sitting on the toilet. If there had been wireless Internet, Jason Biggs' character Jim in American Pie would've been able to come up with a more efficient way to spy on exchange student, Nadia. As Jim says, "God bless the Internet." 

Back then, it seems like it didn't take much to stumble upon secret government files (see: the entire plots of The Net, Hackers and just about any other cyber thriller). Only people with access to the Deep Web are likely the ones who are able to hack into government files.

This isn't 100% wrong. Sadly, Pizza.Net, the site that Sandra Bullock orders pizza from in The Net, is defunct, but thankfully we can order pizza and just about any other food via the Internet today. On second thought, this clip of Sandy ordering pizza, fixing herself a drink and entering a chat room by herself on a lonely evening is probably the most accurate thing about '90s Internet movies.