Futuristic Sci-Fi movie stereotypes!

Miscellaneous and Personal Stuff I Must Share
61

-Rounder is better. Anything with corners is considered primitive (exception: Star Wars).

-An LCD screen is built into EVERYTHING. I envision a world where every square of toilet paper has an LCD screen and control panel built into it. Man, that’d be uncomfortable when you wipe…

-Engine coronas always come in designer colors… blue, hot-pink, flourescent orange, crimson…

-All cyborgs or telepaths are emotionless.

-The more powerful a weapon is, the longer it takes to fire the damn thing.

-Asteroid fields are ALWAYS dangerous and unpredictable, even though the trajectory of any asteroid large enough to be dangerous is detectable even by CURRENT technology.

62

Well, now, I think the procedures for launching an ICBM are a bit more complicated than those for shooting a Saturday Night Special. (At least if Crimson Tide was to be believed…) I mean, you don’t want someone to set off your Ultimate Doomsday Device by accidentally bumping the Big Red Button with their elbow, now do you?

63

For some reason, the good guys have blue engine glows, and the bad guys have red engine glows.

Hmmm…

Almost no current music.

Teenagers don’t have those wacky rebellious fashon statement things.

On star trek TNG shirts ride up real bad, but only on the captain.

64

for some reason you can see the actual beam of a laser.

Asteroid belts and/or fields are usually jam packed with asteroids, instead of having one every million or so cubic kilometres.

65

No, no, not the PRE-FIRE procedure… the actual “Bang!” (or “Kablooie”, if that’s what you prefer) of the gun. For the big-mama end-all-be-all superweapons, there’s always some funky glowing corona, a high-pitched whine of something charging up, and several seconds of tense anticipation… THEN the weapon shoots, long after the trigger has been pulled.

Look at Independence Day (I know, you’d rather not). Those big ol’ saucers, it took close to two minutes from the actual revealing of the superweapon to the actual firing… imagine if they had been targeting another ship with those beams! The target would have PLENTY chance to get away!

If I ran the universe, once you press the “shoot” button, things would SHOOT, hot-dammit!

66

I’ve noticed that whatever the current hot new technology is, ot becomes the basis for all technology in the future: “How does your invisibility ray work, Dr. Zarkov?”
“Why it uses e-lec-tricity!”

Radio: All cars! Kong has started to climb the Empire State Building.
Buckeroo #1: Well, that’s it. We’ll never stop him now.
Buckeroo #2: Hmmm. Wait a minute! We forgot about aeroplanes!
Buckeroo #1: Yes, of course! Aeroplanes! I’ll call the airfield…
(shot of man in a biplane with leather helmet, goggles, and a very long scarf tossed over his shoulder. Sound of a lawnmower engine.)

Then, after the Manhattan project, everything was related, one way or another, to radiation - giant mutant bugs and so forth. Later, everything was computers: Let’s ask the computer brain how we should stop the aliens!

Now, it’s all DNA. Why are the aliens attacking us? Obviously, they want our DNA for some nefarious purpose or other. Either that or there’s a strange space-radiation causing our DNA to decay (a double: radiation and DNA!)
The other ubiquitous scifi stereotype is most unfortunate - the aliens with psychic powers. Why does pseudoscience have such a death grip on sci-fi?

67

Before humans make contact, no alien race ever stumbled on the innovation of giving names to their plants and animals. Fortunately, humans fixed things, so people in the future can say “she’s slipprier than a Vegan eel”, or “she’s more ferocious than a Betelgian wombat.”

Sua

68

Hmmm, missed this one the first time around. Thanks, Sua, for the resurrection.

What’s always bothered me, and it STILL happens in CURRENT sci-fi movies, is how frickin’ noisy the computers are! They’re constantly beeping, whirring, clicking, ka-chunking… Even on a text-only green screen monitor, the cursor makes a blip sound for every letter it types.

I guess movie computers are like movie people - they aren’t really working unless they’re making noise…

69

Something I always found interesting was how on classic ST, the red-shirt was of course the first to fall into the pit, get vaporized (or faded away), catch space herpes or whatever. The yellow-shirts (captain, lt commander, commodore) almost always lived. In STNG, they gave the captain and first-officer a red shirt and sent the yellow-shirts to their gruesome demise.

70

Since everyone is burrowing into American SY-FIE that basically hasn’t changed since the 50’s (except for getting more overt with sex, violence and cussin’ - ah, the 60’s!) there hasn’t been much offered about the Big Hero. He always acts American, which basically is shown by orneriness, rugged individualism and stupid macho. There is also the Big Heroine (Thank you, Barbarella) who is usually acting flustered and girly but nonetheless saves the day by ssomehow being competent while wearing nearly nothing. Both versions like to Blow Things Up Real Good. They like sex with other species. They often turn what their evil adversary calls a weakness into a strength to defeat the bad guy/thing/army, or else there is a deus ex machina (perfect for science friction) which provides the ironic twist for the ending. Oh, and everybody shows chest - men got pecs, and evven aliens wear a wonderbra!!

71

Ok, here are a bunch I noticed. Sorry if I repeat any.

  1. Ships are REAL big (Star Wars, ID4, Alien series, BattleStar Galactica, Babylon 5, pretty much every ship) - Apparently, in the future, there is a need to design super gigantic ships like a Super Star Destroyer (or even a regular star destroyer) or the ships from ID4. No matter how big though, there is always one critical flaw that the designers don’t know about but can quickly be exploited in battle. Kind of like throwing a rock at the right point on the USS Nimitz and sinking it.

  2. A race of aliens from the planet Hypocritus 4 - You know, the ones who threaten to destroy the entire Earth if we don’t stop our violent ways. Also seen in many episodes of Star Trek.

  3. A robot or other appliance learns the meaning of being human, falls in love or exhibits other human like qualities (Hal from 2001, The gay droids from Star Wars, Every episode of Star Trek, T100 (Arnold?) from Terminator 2, Bishop from Aliens, The Screamers from Screamers, The replicants from Blade Runner, and so on)

  4. Small arms in the future are spectacular yet impracticle - Blasters and phasers which emit bright “tracers” that reveal the shooters position (Not to mention slow rate of fire and limited penetration). Automatic rifles (Aliens, Starship Troopers, etc) that are so big and loaded down with grenade launchers, scopes, and other crap that they are prohibitively bulky. (As a side note, look at the new OICW Rifle developed for the Army’s Land Warrior program. It looks like something out of Aliens)

  5. Tanks will be replaced by giant fighting robots (Star Wars: TESB/ROTJ, any Japanese Sci Fi cartoon, Robocop)

  6. Anyone who travels in time can kick the ass of anyone in the new time(Michael Biehn in Terminator, Van Damme in Timecop) Buck Rodgers went forward in time and was a better pilot than everyone. Just like a WWI ace would be if you put him in a modern F18 Hornet. Time travel itself is also a SciFi cliche.

  7. Everyone speaks english or uses universal translators. There are, however certain untranslatable words (mostly profanities, foods and units of measurement) where the alien language is used. (Star Trek and Farscape do this a lot - Crighton: “Lets get the frell out of here” Dude, just say “get the hell” or “fuck out of here”, unless that’s an Austrailian term I don’t know about.)

  8. Anachronisms like monarchies, slavery, swordfighting etc are still in practice. (Dune, Star Wars)

  9. Planets with one type of environment (Dune, all Star Wars and Star Trek planets, etc)

  10. Aliens fall into human one dimensional stereotypes - All Ferengi are greedy, all Klingons are violent, etc.

  11. The Alien cliche - Small group trapped in a ship/planet and systematically killed by an alien/s (Alien series obviously, Predator, Event Horizon, Pitch Black, Screamers, LOTs of B-movies) The alien never has any motive (food, protecting its young). It just kills everything for no reason.

  12. The Earth Invasion Cliche - Race of advanced aliens travels halfway across the galaxy to invade Earth for some resource they cant find anywhere else in the galaxy. Extra points if that resource is water since Hydrogen and Oxygen are some of the most common elements in the universe.

  13. Pretty much anything from Star Trek.

72

Government - a surprising number of feudal-style empires exist in the future, probably because teenage boys think titles (like Duke Leto) are cool, and want to envision themselves part of the privileged class.

Either that or a repressive, Big-Brother-like police state that somehow can easily be defeated by a handful of rebels, usually connected with blowing up the enemy HQ or doing away with the Head Bad Guy.

Clothing tidbits: Big swoopy standup collars, often attached to the abovementioned capes. And little puffy crescent-shaped ridges running fore-and-aft at the outside edge of the shoulders. Early 50s space crews also wore a lot of baseball caps.

Radio or two-way video communications often exceed the speed of light, allowing protagonists to taunt one another planet-to-planet in real time.

The rule of three, as a comedian once said. In any list of famous people recited by people in the future, two will be from our own past and the third will be from our “future” as in “Yes, he’s worse than any of the conquerers of the past: Alexander the Great, Ghengis Khan, or Krylol of Rigel 4.”

There don’t seem to be any farms in the future - only vats of sludge, hydroponic tanks or (gack!) Soylent Green.

Nobody mows the lawn, tinkers with their personal vehicle or paints the house. Robots clean everything, and kitchen implements prepare food themselves.

Many household robots have semifake English accents.

The couple who make it safely away from the repressive society/exploding spaceship, etc and land their barely operable lifeboat on a fresh green virgin world will turn out to have names that are some recognizable variant of Adam and Eve.
And so on.

73

As for the Predators, there’s an extremely simple and believable explanation that I’m amazed no one else has thought of yet:

They collect hunting trophies to impress the babes!

Ever hear of a bower bird? They’re a number of species of birds that instead of the male having bright, flashy plumage, the male instead collects bright flashy items. The male with the biggest bestest collection draws the most females. I can easily envision a species where the male who has survived collecting a big collection of trophies from the most dangerous hunters/predators around would be considered the most desirable mate. He would have proven that he’s tough, smart and a good protector.

74

Wow. I would live in the holodeck. They’d drag out my body after I starved to death, and at the wake, people would be saying, “Well, not peaceful, exactly-but he sure looks happy. I’ve never seen a smile that big!”

75

Actually, I take that back. The aliens have simple motives (Aliens - wierd parasitic reproductive process, Pradator - trophy hunters, Pitch Black - food, Screamers - actually killer robots genre, Event Horizon/Sphere - I don’t know. Evil orb shit or something. )

Another cliche -

Humans or someone create war machines that eventually evolve and turn on their masters.

Planets that have only one industry or purpose (The garbage planet in Soldier, the various recreation planets talked about in Star Trek, The penal planet in Alien 3, Dune, and the assorted mining colonies throughout sci fi.

76

The doors are psychic. If you head for the door, it opens for you. If you are just walking by the door, but not out the door, it won’t open (try that one at a grocery store!) If you still have a point to make, and you turn around to make it, the door WON’T open until you are done.

There will always be an elevator waiting for you when in everyday use, but if you are being chased, it is either out of order, or takes until the last possible moment to show up…

77

I’m just stunned at how many of these cliche’s AREN’T seen in Star Wars :smiley:

Anyway, here’s one that I don’t recall having seen mentioned… in most sci-fi series, they always have wondrous medical technology, but there’s always just one or two elusive diseases that they just can’t seem to cure until a random doctor accidently stumbles across the cure after spilling an exotic animals’ droppings in a petri dish (or something).

78

And then, when they do diversify, all of these citizens of this peacefully united Earth, where ethnic discrimination is a thing of the past, each and every one of them has a surname to match their ethnicity. Someone named Mr. Singh never has blond hair and an Irish brogue, for instance. Sulu was all Aisan and Chekov was all Russian.

In the future, we will eschew racial and ethnic prejudice, but no one will marry or reproduce outside their ethnicity (as defined by 20th century categories). Or probably their religion, either.

79

lestrange, that was a good post. I’d noticed that in TV more than in books but you are right.

I’ve read at least one exception though. In his book Four-Day Planet(copyrighted 1961) the author H. Beam Piper had this passage, which is told by the first-person narrator of the book) “Nip Spazoni’s name was Old Terran Italian but he had slanted Mongoloid eyes and a sparse little chin-beard, which accounted for his nickname. The amount of intermarriage that’s gone on since the First Century, any resemblance between people’s names and their appearances is purely coincidental. Oscar Fujisawa, who looks as though his name ought to be Leif Ericsson, for example.”

The “First Century” mentioned in the above passage was dated from 1942 AD I think, the date of the first controlled nuclear experiment.

80

Piper was fond of casually tossing off ethnically mixed characters like that; his novel Uller Uprising included characters named “Themistocles M’zangwe” and “Hideyoshi O’Leary”.