Five top movies about spending too much time online – just like you’re doing during Covid-19 lockdown

From The Matrix to The Social Network, some of the best films in recent years have been about people who get too much pleasure from being on their computers

Here are five of the best when it comes to unhealthy online interaction and the frightening results it can have

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Carrie-Anne Moss (left) and Keanu Reeves star in The Matrix (1999). Its most prescient prediction is how, when given the red pill/blue pill choice, some people prefer to live entirely online. Photo: Courtesy Everett Collection

Published: 11:00pm, 22 Jul 2020Updated: 3:00am, 23 Jul 2020

Tired of staring at your phone all the time? Try one of these pieces of clickbait cinema instead.

1. The Matrix (1999)

Made when the internet was still, for most people, just a dial-up diversion, the Wachowski siblings’ spectacular sci-fi combines a manga plot with Hong Kong-style action and much philosophical musing.

Computer programmer Thomas “Neo” Anderson (Keanu Reeves) discovers the truth about real life – it isn’t real. Instead it’s a simulation used by evil robots to keep humanity enslaved, “a prison for your mind”, according to Neo’s mentor Morpheus (Lawrence Fishburne).

Shot on sets left over from Alex Proyas’ Dark City (1998), the scenes that take place inside The Matrix have the greenish tint of a PC monitor, and show Neo turning into a kind of cyber superhero to game the system in style.

From its groundbreaking special effects to its investment in Reeves as an action hero, the film was way ahead of its time. Perhaps its most prescient prediction is how, when given the red pill/blue pill choice, some people prefer to live entirely online.

A scene from Pulse (2001). The film’s premise is how lonely ghosts use the internet as a portal to invade our world.

2. Pulse (2001)

Most J-horror films from the turn of the millennium deal with the intersection of technology and loneliness.