Featuring technology as a central part of your narrative is a gambit. Movies are inherently bound to the technology available at the time of production, yet oftentimes in the past they have wanted to show a great advancement on the screen. And, as time marches on, those advancements end up looking quite quaint (even humorously so) in hindsight. The following movies are such examples. Now, we’re not saying they are ruined by the aforementioned march of time, but they do now hold a certain irony. The viewer is supposed to have their jaw on the floor because of these marvelous digital worlds but during a viewing today they look more distracting than anything else.
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Sometimes they do get away with it, though. For instance, Alien. Weyland-Yutani treats its employees like dirt so why wouldn’t they load the Nostromo up with history’s most ancient boop-boppy operating system? Not to mention, the limited tech help sells just how trapped its characters are. But these following movies? They don’t quite get away with it after the passing of a few decades. These days they just look, well, silly.
5) WarGames
As far as its plot, themes, and acting go, WarGames is still a treat. The tech it shows, however, couldn’t pull of what the narrative says it could.
Matthew Broderick’s David Lightman hacks into the number one United States supercomputer, the one with access to nukes, basically by scanning phone numbers and guessing a single name on his IMSAI 8080. Even with older technology there would be far more safeguards in play on a nuke-guarding supercomputer than that.
Stream WarGames on fuboTV.
4) Hackers
The movie Angelina Jolie considers her true debut, Hackers is a fun and stylish nostalgia fest. However, its depiction of hacking was seen as way off by mid ’90s hackers and no part of that has changed.
This is a movie where a character can essentially hit the same key repeatedly and break into a mainframe. Or they can look at a computer and be in awe of its 28.8 BPS modem.
Stream Hackers on Cinemax Prime Video channel.
3) Johnny Mnemonic
An often quite bizarre but underrated cyberpunk movie that nonetheless is frequently hard to keep up with, Johnny Mnemonic was never going to be a hit with a wide audience, like The Matrix from four years later. A big part of the issue was Sony’s insistence that it be re-edited into a straightforward action movie in the wake of Speed‘s massive success.
However, even if the film had stuck with its original irony-stuffed approach, it still would have been reliant on some virtual internet sequences that have long since aged out of their involving nature. Now they just look like the graphics of an early PS2 game in the middle of a silly post-apocalypse movie with a finale involving a dolphin that decrypts courier’s high-priced cognitive payloads.
2) Tron
15 years later, Tron: Legacy still looks phenomenal. The 1982 original Tron film? Not so much. In fact, if you didn’t grow up on it, its antiquated effects may prove to be outright alienating these days.
However, there are plenty of people who did grow up on it who defend the film’s aesthetics. It may not visually represent an advanced computer world but an ’80s one? Sure, in that regard it looks about right.
Stream Tron on Disney+.
1) The Lawnmower Man
A Stephen King adaptation so wildly different from the source material the author filed a lawsuit to get his name off the film’s marketing. The narrative deals heavily in virtual reality, which essentially now looks about one thousand times cheaper than even the cheapest free game on an Oculus Quest headset.
The Lawnmower Man was released one year before Jurassic Park, another movie featuring a sequence that has been cited as a bit technologically ridiculous. However, the part in Jurassic Park where Lex unlocks the park’s security system using a UNIX system really did make sense, because that was how that particular system looked when on Silicon Graphics machines. The Lawnmower Man, however, is just front to back absurd.
Stream The Lawnmower Man on Prime Video.
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Image courtesy of Lucasfilm. -
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