National Lampoon’s Vacation. You know those kids would have tried to buy tickets online and/or checked WallyWorld’s website before setting out.
Usual Suspects. While Verbal Kint shares his story, the other cops listening in are Googling or checking LinkedIn, Facebook, etc. for the people he’s mentioning.
Grease becomes a nine-second film where Sandy tweets “OMG change of plans not moving. Enrolling at Rydell” Danny RTs “that’s amazeballs. Next year will be made of awesome.” Actually they’re “teens” so they’re probably Snapchatting.
It’s a Wonderful Life:
George does his banking online and deposits the $8000 with the click of a mouse. Uncle Billy never gets his Silly stupid old hands on it.
Being able to email her boyfriend on her phone and ask him what he was up to would have avoided all of the confusion and most of the plot of The Twilight Saga: New Moon.
*Planes, Trains, and Automobiles * would require some very extensive rewriting if it were being remade today. Smart phones and internet pretty well eliminate the basis for all the humor in the original.
All those scenes in “Se7en”, with Morgan Freeman looking up info on the Seven Deadly Sins at that poorly-lit library; now Brad Pitt does a quick perusal on his iPhone of the Wikipedia article and can say, “Shut up, old man. I know you are about to retire, but you aren’t gonna lecture me 'bout no deadly sins as I have just read the article!”
The Lady Vanishes. “Yes ma’am, I have a Miss Froy here in the database, so I don’t know why these people are pretending she doesn’t exist.” Meanwhile, two dudes go to icc-cricket.com and discover the match was cancelled, and Miss Froy emails folktune.wav to Whitehall.gov
An Affair to Remember…a quick text would have solved that whole Empire State Building Problem pretty quickly.
Rear Window…Jimmy Stewart could have done a quick google search or accessed some online telephone/residential records to determine the deceased woman’s identity and her husband/killer. Also he could have set up some Hi-def webcams to monitor the place while he slept… Heck, the whole movie would be shot to hell. He’d have spent endless hours on his ‘device’ and never even glanced out the window once!
Similarly with North by Northwest: “Hmn, there’s no George Kaplan that fits this description findable in any search. Bet he’s just a fictional device being used by the government!”
Also, the entire last act of *Romeo and Juliet *would be seriously derailed if R & J could communicate with each other.
I don’t think that there any plots that wouldn’t work. Have you not noticed that whenever necessary in modern movies the hero or heroine can’t get a connection to the net or their cellphone suddenly can’t get a signal? Screenwriters have a thousand and one ways to set the clock back.
I’ve thought of a work-around for that: As part of Romeo’s exile, police Capt. Prince* tells him that his cellphone will be monitored. While Capt. Prince just means his location so that Romeo doesn’t try sneaking back into the city, Romeo and/or Juliet, being prone to drama and not terribly bright, overreact to this and both ditch their cellphones. :smack:
*Yes, inspired by this modernized version from 1996 just when cellphones were becoming common.
Why wouldn’t there be? The whole point of George Kaplan is that people who have the wherewithal to provide him with various IDs busily make hotel reservations for him easy as sending up his dry cleaning; they’d surely make searchable info findable.
Spencer Tracy wouldn’t have needed to use his extensive connections to verify Sidney Poitier’s identity and credentials in “Guess Who’s Coming To Dinner”.
