10 Sci-Fi Movies That Aged Poorly Thanks To Real Tech

mo_ztt, 7 months ago

Dude what the heck

Strange Days revolves around the use of the SQUID, an illegal device that records memories and sensations from the cerebral cortex of the person wearing it. The SQUID device itself is designed comparably to modern medical devices that read brain activity. Moreover, the idea of a black market for illegally obtained memories for pleasure seekers is a great premise for a sci-fi thriller. However, Strange Days takes a laughable turn when it’s revealed that the SQUID records memories on a classic '90s MiniDisc, which stores a maximum of 80 minutes of audio. Strange Days has a great futuristic concept, but it missed the mark in terms of data storage.

Or, maybe it’s a little storage device that just happens to use the MiniDisc form factor. That’s it, that’s the whole complaint about the whole movie, that the storage device was wrong.

A lot of the other bullet points are pretty similar, like “yeah the movie was great and the premise was well handled but they didn’t predict how this particular thing which was perfectly realistic and sensible would look” or “they missed this technological development and didn’t include it in their future world to go along with the 5 others they got more or less right.”

Bro if you want clicks just make an article about how AI is scary.

arquebus_x, 7 months ago

And it's not even really supposed to be a MiniDisc. That's just the prop they adapted.

remus989, 7 months ago

• Johnny Mnemonic (1995)
• Blade Runner (1982)
• Back to the Future Part II (1989)
• Strange Days (1995)
• Alien (1979)
• Total Recall (1990)
• The Lawnmower Man (1992)
• 2010: The Year We Make Contact (1984)
• Hackers (1995)
• Star Trek: Nemesis (2002)

Also, I disagree on almost every single part of this list. None of these are worse off because of current tech. It’s sci fi for christ sake, use some suspension of disbelief and watch some fun movies.

CmdrShepard, 7 months ago

I gotta agree with you.

For me, the one thing that really dates a production, and is something mostly seen with TV shows, is cellphones. The Wire could be set in modern times until you see them pull out a flip phone and start talking about the little Nokia burner phones. Same for The X-Files which I’ve been rewatching through lately.

Mechanismatic, 7 months ago

Yeah, it’s only problematic if you think science fiction is supposed to predict the future accurately and is deficient if it fails to do so. If you want predictions, read academic studies. If you want interesting stories about characters and the conflicts they encounter, then look to fiction.

Would the same thing be said about fantasy fiction? “10 Fantasy Movies that Depict Magic Differently than this Article Writer Thinks it Would Hypothetically Work.”

reddig33, 7 months ago

Some of these became “cassette futurism” which can be even cooler than predicting the actual future. It’s like alternate timelines of what the future could have looked like. I especially like the prevalence of minidisc in Strange Days and the Apple II aesthetic of 2010.

remus989, 7 months ago

I absolutely love cassette futurism! You should join c/cassettefuturism@lemm.ee if you haven’t already

CarlsIII, 7 months ago (edited 7 months ago)

I know a lot of people think fax machines no longer exist because they personally don’t use them, but a lot of businesses still use them.

Edit: The real failed prediction of BTTF2 is the 80’s-themed diners. I’ve waited my whole life for those and we still don’t have them.

inkican, 7 months ago

I love how William Gibson built entire plot arcs around fax being the future standard of communication when email was literally right there. Doesn't matter - I still love the Sprawl series - just illustrates how futurology works sometimes.

WHYAREWEALLCAPS, 7 months ago

At the time it was exceedingly rare that email was used for anything other than text because the bandwidth just wasn't there. And especially to the masses. Hell, 10 base T, with it's 10 megabits per second, wasn't a thing till 1990 while people were still generally stuck at 9600 baud as the top end for their modems. The idea of having 10 base T speeds to the home wasn't even a pipe dream at that point.

Even email wasn't necessarily universal. You could be on one system, say CompuServe, but you couldn't email anyone on Prodigy or the internet or FIDOnet or any of the other different places people had email. And some were dependent on what computer you had. A fax machine though? Anyone could buy one, plug it in, and et voila, be able to get faxes from anyone else with a fax or fax other people. You could include pictures, something that email did not do at the time. The idea that email would include anything but ASCII was still in its infancy.

And this doesn't even touch on how hard it would be to know all this back in the day if you were not heavily into technology and read many of the monthly technology magazines. We're spoiled by the internet today, and I say this as someone who grew up in the 70s and 80s and is totally spoiled by the internet. It is hard for my kids to conceive of a time where you couldn't just hop on Google and look up everything there is to know about a topic and especially bleeding edge information about it. All that used to be the domain of the respective disciplines's top people or people who bothered to read the latest papers coming out.

To people of Gibson's time, myself included, the idea that fax would rule was not nearly as insane as the idea that people would be able to pull a nigh infinite amount of information from their computers. And doing something like watching a movie through your computer? That would have seemed far more futuristic than he was trying to convey. That was some straight up Star Trek stuff. And remember, he was trying to convey a world that wasn't that far in the future.

I think the biggest problem with these lists is that it lacks the context of the times they were made in. Alien with it's CRTs and big single unit terminal with attached chair to access the ship's AI did not seem out of place at all. The minidisc player in Strange Days? It happened right as we were transitioning to DVDs - when previously discs could only hold albums. It didn't seem far fetched that they'd increase data and decrease size continually. Indeed, these lists seem to require that you not have that context because the moment you do, you realize how silly they are. And when you consider these are movies, that have limited budgets to project the future, these lists really fall apart.

inkican, 7 months ago

I pay close attention these types of issues since as a writer I'm constantly thinking about how future tech could impact culture.