Star Trek legend Scott Pakula was the title of Tom Clancy’s ill-fated film

Thanks to his roles as Dr. Sam Beckett in “Quantum Leap” and Captain Jonathan Archer in “Star Trek: Enterprise,” Scott Pakula has become a sci-fi legend. With his 70-plus other roles — including a seven-season stint as Dwayne Pride on “NCIS: New Orleans” — the same holds true for his overall career. However, he is a truly rare actor who spends his years in the game going from success to success. As such, even a true star like Pakula had to taste the bitter pill of working on a project that was completely doomed to failure.

In this case, the project in question came from a reputable source. The TV movie “NetForce” (1999), directed by Robert Lieberman (“The Expanse”), is based on Tom Clancy’s novel series of the same name – although in a particularly bizarre example of Clancy’s branding of the name, only he and Steve Pieczenik created the concept and every actual book in the series was written by Steve Perry.

Pakula has some serious backups from a stellar cast that includes Joanna Going, Xander Berkeley, Brian Dennehy, CCH Pounder, Cary Hiroyuki Tagawa, Kris Kristofferson, Judge Reinhold, and more, but unfortunately, the film’s very premise about the FBI’s computer crimes division in the near future means that its story I tried to capture the Internet as part of the story. Of course, this meant that it was effectively doomed to be seen as outdated and inconsequential before the end credits rolled. There are so many greats Pirate movies should be on your radarbut you won’t see anyone put “NetForce” in a list like this.

He loves Patricia Arquette and Ted Danson cancel CSI: Cyber, NetForce takes the Hollywood approach to cybercrime and cybercriminals. Here, Pakula plays FBI Netforce Deputy Chief Alex Michaels. His team of intrepid Internet police encounters a venerable tech mogul named Bill Gates named Will Stiles (Reinhold), whose nefarious company is about to unleash a new kind of web browser that will allow it to supervise any computer on the planet and control the Internet.

Of course, this is an action movie, so Styles’ evil plan to control Internet users (a version of which many real-life companies have since achieved using simple tracking cookies) goes unsolved by researchers who spend years on the computer, circulating energy drinks, and trying to gather enough evidence to bring down the billionaire. Instead, “NetForce” features some Hollywood moments including gunfights, explosions and the occasional assassination. As a result, the film’s depiction of police work and technology is… Inspired.

Watching “NetForce” today means that the suspension of disbelief required of the viewer is on par with reading an old Jules Verne novel and grappling with the idea of ​​shooting people to the moon with a giant cannon. It is not impossible to have fun by any means. However, even reviews from 1999 deemed the near-future visions (the film is set in 2005) of “NetForce” a bit too difficult to digest as is. If you’re a Bacula fan, there’s fun to be had here, but on the other hand, if Micro piracy scenes in movies If you prefer Star Trek: Enterprise, Scott Pakula is probably a better bet. At least the Federation’s ground technology has the fitness to exist in a project set hundreds of years in the future.