NetForce (1999): Tom Clancy's FBI Cyber-Cops Patrol the "Information Superhighway"

NetForce (1999): Tom Clancy's FBI Cyber-Cops Patrol the "Information Superhighway"

Broadcast on ABC on February 1, 1999 as a two-part, 200-minute made-for-television film with a reported $20 million budget, NetForce was adapted from the Tom Clancy / Steve Pieczenik novel series, directed by Robert Lieberman and written by Lionel Chetwynd, and starred Scott Bakula, Joanna Going, Kris Kristofferson, and Brian Dennehy. Its premise: by the year 2005, the FBI has created a dedicated division, "NetForce," to investigate computer crime and police the internet¹ — and the villain, Will Stiles (Judge Reinhold), is a thinly veiled Bill Gates figure whose new web browser "may allow him to hack into any computer in the world and to gain control of the Internet."

The film is a fascinating artifact of the late-1990s assumption that the internet would need a standing paramilitary police force — the same government-cyber-cop imagining that produced Level 9 (2000): Cybercrime Agencies and Rehabilitated Hackers a year later. Its 2005 future is a period-piece time capsule in the wrong direction: agents carry VHS-tape-sized cell phones with folding video screens, "websites" are photorealistic virtual-reality hubs "that can be accessed with Windows '95," and courts issue "e-warrants" from virtual courtrooms. As WIRED's 2013 retrospective put it, the movie imagines 2005 with less accuracy than a stereotype grandparent would: "If you took that exact person and asked them to write a three-and-a-half hour movie about cybercops who battled Internet crime, you would still end up with something that had a slightly better grasp of technology than NetForce."

The film's most memorable (and most parodied) flourish: Bakula's hero confides in a "Virtual Kris Kristofferson" avatar of his assassinated mentor — telling it, with a single tear rolling down his cheek, "Someone's been hijackin' the net... big time." The twist ending has Kristofferson's character, "one of the major architects of the internet," alive and about to destroy his own creation from a button in the Oval Office, declaiming: "All it did was create endless opportunities for perversion and corruption, serving greed, lust, and all the rest of the seven deadly sins." WIRED conceded: "I have to hand it to Tom Clancy. That part is actually pretty accurate."

Critics were merciless. Bruce Fretts of Entertainment Weekly called it "boring cyber-nonsense"; The New York Times wrote that "so much is going on, and so much dialogue is devoted to explaining it, that no one has time to be interesting"; the Chicago Tribune dismissed it as "pretty silly stuff." But its fears — a Gates-like monopolist controlling the internet through a browser, porn as the net's true product, the state scrambling to catch up — were precisely the anxieties of the Microsoft antitrust era, delivered in network-television form.