# How come science fiction films rarely use "exotic" fictional technology anymore? **URL:** \ **Category:** Cafe Society\ **Created:** [September 27, 2013, 9:43pm UTC](https://boards.straightdope.com/t/how-come-science-fiction-films-rarely-use-exotic-fictional-technology-anymore/669839 "2013-09-27T21:43:59Z")\ **Posts on this page:** 14\ **Page:** 4
**Author:** ![MrDibble](https://sea3.discourse-cdn.com/straightdope/user_avatar/boards.straightdope.com/mrdibble/32/114_2.png) [@MrDibble](https://boards.straightdope.com/u/MrDibble)\ **Post date:** [September 30, 2013, 2:43pm UTC](https://boards.straightdope.com/t/how-come-science-fiction-films-rarely-use-exotic-fictional-technology-anymore/669839/61 "2013-09-30T14:43:27Z")
> [@msmith537](#): > > For the past 30 years, Blade Runner, all the Alien films, Babylon 5 (at least the human stuff), Red Dwarf, Starship Troopers, Battlestar Galactica, games like Halo or Homeworld, Avatar, Elysium all might take place on the same fictional Earth. One reason why, despite all the hate it gets, I really like the _Aeon Flux_ movie, was its embracing of some small sense of style. Ditto the _Dune_ miniseries, ridiculous hats and all. ---
**Author:** ![MrDibble](https://sea3.discourse-cdn.com/straightdope/user_avatar/boards.straightdope.com/mrdibble/32/114_2.png) [@MrDibble](https://boards.straightdope.com/u/MrDibble)\ **Post date:** [September 30, 2013, 2:53pm UTC](https://boards.straightdope.com/t/how-come-science-fiction-films-rarely-use-exotic-fictional-technology-anymore/669839/62 "2013-09-30T14:53:50Z")
> [@Martini\_Enfield](#): > > The FN P90 didn’t exist when _Aliens_ was made - the Pulse Rifles were made from M1A1 Thompson SMGs, Remington M870s and (IIRC) SPAS-12s. FWIW, the Steyr AUG has been doing duty as film and TV’s “Futuristic Space Gun” pretty much since its production began in the late 1970s.[…] > The Star Wars energy small arms are based on real world guns as well - Han Solo’s blaster is a Mauser C96, Princess Leia’s is a Russian Margolin .22 target pistol, the blaster rifles the storm troopers carry are modified Sterling SMGs (with some MG-42 and Lewis LMGs as stand-ins for heavier weapons, the Jawas are carrying sawn-off Lee-Enfields with grenade launcher attachments, and even Boba Fett’s gun is a WWI-era Webley signal pistol developed for the RAF. You likely know it already, but not everyone might - the [Internet Movie Firearms Database](http://www.imfdb.org/index.php?title=Main_Page) is a handy resource for this sort of thing. And yes, the future nowadays is all bullpup, all the time 🙂 ---
**Author:** ![msmith537](https://avatars.discourse-cdn.com/v4/letter/m/d9b06d/32.png) [@msmith537](https://boards.straightdope.com/u/msmith537)\ **Post date:** [October 1, 2013, 2:41am UTC](https://boards.straightdope.com/t/how-come-science-fiction-films-rarely-use-exotic-fictional-technology-anymore/669839/63 "2013-10-01T02:41:10Z")
> [@MrDibble](#): > > One reason why, despite all the hate it gets, I really like the _Aeon Flux_ movie, was its embracing of some small sense of style. Ditto the _Dune_ miniseries, ridiculous hats and all. The similarly horrible Ultraviolet with Milla Jovovich also had some interesting technologies. Including gravity manipulation and like Tardis-like spaces that were bigger on the inside. ---
**Author:** ![dotchan](https://avatars.discourse-cdn.com/v4/letter/d/9d8465/32.png) [@dotchan](https://boards.straightdope.com/u/dotchan)\ **Post date:** [October 1, 2013, 3:22am UTC](https://boards.straightdope.com/t/how-come-science-fiction-films-rarely-use-exotic-fictional-technology-anymore/669839/64 "2013-10-01T03:22:14Z")
Confession: I’m the nerd you don’t want to sit near in a movie theater, because I will grouse about the violations of physics or practicality of a Cool Future Thing. Take Star Wars’ hovercrafts. Nifty-looking, yes, but also a horrible multi-crash accident waiting to happen. How the hell are you supposed to stop that thing? And if you are going to have flying cars, then why is aerial future traffic visually identical to modern-day gridlock? (Futurama gets a pass because it’s obviously making fun of all of that.) On the other hand, I’m also cognizant that sometimes you don’t need to explain everything. When the whole midichlorians thing came out I cried bullshit long and loud right beside the hardcore fans. The Force didn’t need to have a rational origin! It just exists! And maybe I was reading too much into it, but the True Force isn’t something you can tap into willy nilly–sure the Jedi were able to manipulate it, but Yoda definitely seemed to be more of the philosophy of “Go With the Flow”, because trying to arrange one of the fundamental forces of the universe to do your own personal bidding is Dark Side stuff, son! ---
**Author:** ![Trinopus](https://avatars.discourse-cdn.com/v4/letter/t/2bfe46/32.png) [@Trinopus](https://boards.straightdope.com/u/Trinopus)\ **Post date:** [October 1, 2013, 3:28am UTC](https://boards.straightdope.com/t/how-come-science-fiction-films-rarely-use-exotic-fictional-technology-anymore/669839/65 "2013-10-01T03:28:39Z")
> [@dotchan](#): > > . . . Take Star Wars’ hovercrafts. Nifty-looking, yes, but also a horrible multi-crash accident waiting to happen. . . . Grin! When I saw The Hobbit, my first reaction was, “Doesn’t anybody around here believe in safety railings?” Star Wars, too, was terribly deficient in the most basic safety equipment! ---
**Author:** ![Mtgman](https://avatars.discourse-cdn.com/v4/letter/m/b5a626/32.png) [@Mtgman](https://boards.straightdope.com/u/Mtgman)\ **Post date:** [October 1, 2013, 6:13am UTC](https://boards.straightdope.com/t/how-come-science-fiction-films-rarely-use-exotic-fictional-technology-anymore/669839/66 "2013-10-01T06:13:27Z")
> [@msmith537](#): > > Is it just me, or does most current sci fy tech try to be too “grounded in reality”. In the old days, Star Wars and Star Trek and other media had all kinds of crazy shit scientists couldn’t even tell you how it might be built - teleporters, replicators, energy weapons, force shields. > > Now thanks to James Cameron, the future looks like space marines travelling between the stars in giant gunmetal shipping containers, wearing Land Warrior gear, riding in VTOL aircraft with tilting nacelles, shooting Belgian automatic rifles with extra tac-lights, lasers and optics, with equipment and vehicles that came from a Raytheon proposal for a DARPA research grant, probably thinking about their loved ones back home living in a giant 400 story tower and riding a maglev train to work. > [@drewtwo99](#): > > I’m sorry but Avatar showcased a pretty phenomenal piece of technology that I doubt will ever actually exist. A gadget that let you take over a body and control it as if it were your own. Pretty damn cool. Surrogate, the Bruce Willis flick, had the same sort of thing but with robots and realized in a massive political scale. That’s pretty awesome. > > In short, I don’t agree with the OP’s premise at all. To expand on what **drewtwo99** said, there is tons of fantastic stuff in Avatar which is completely unexplainable by our current science. Although it’s mostly on the Na’vi side. Everything from the planet-wide gestalt between animals, vegetation and the Na’vi to the direct mental contact through a shared set of neural bundles that it seems all the lifeforms on the planet have. It’s like waking up tomorrow and being able to wire together your brain with that of a chicken and both of you understand each other’s thoughts, even without a shared language and vast differences in sensory organs. The kinds of evolutionary differences which would create such a world are simply mind-boggling. Beyond that there’s the oracular aspects(the glowing flower seed that showed Neytiri she should trust Jake, and her mother’s vision of him in the clan), the planet girdling consciousness Eywa, the transferrence of consciousness from Jake to his Avatar at the end. Overall there are tons of things modern science can’t explain about the Avatar world. Enjoy, Steven ---
**Author:** ![Chronos](https://sea3.discourse-cdn.com/straightdope/user_avatar/boards.straightdope.com/chronos/32/134_2.png) [@Chronos](https://boards.straightdope.com/u/Chronos)\ **Post date:** [October 1, 2013, 3:45pm UTC](https://boards.straightdope.com/t/how-come-science-fiction-films-rarely-use-exotic-fictional-technology-anymore/669839/67 "2013-10-01T15:45:48Z")
> [@](#): > > The kinds of evolutionary differences which would create such a world are simply mind-boggling. That’s because they aren’t evolutionary. The Na’vi, and the creatures they interact with, were intelligently designed. And I’m pretty sure that the specific purpose for which the Na’vi were designed was to provide a way for Eywa to communicate with humans. **dotchan** , I presume that the brakes on a Star Wars hovercar are based on the same technology (whatever it is) that lets it hover in the first place. If you can exert a force straight down sufficient to support the car, then you can also exert a force in a slightly different direction to stop it. ---
**Author:** ![ricksummon](https://sea3.discourse-cdn.com/straightdope/user_avatar/boards.straightdope.com/ricksummon/32/3333_2.png) [@ricksummon](https://boards.straightdope.com/u/ricksummon)\ **Post date:** [October 1, 2013, 4:03pm UTC](https://boards.straightdope.com/t/how-come-science-fiction-films-rarely-use-exotic-fictional-technology-anymore/669839/68 "2013-10-01T16:03:31Z")
I should point out that Eywa isn’t a supernatural being; she’s an intelligence inhabiting the planet-wide neural network formed by Pandora’s trees. That’s what Grace tried to tell the RDA administrator, who was basically the same character as the Evil Paul Reiser™ from _Aliens_, just played by a different actor. Sigourney Weaver, of all people, should have known this. 🙂 I agree, though, that Eywa intelligently designed the animal life on Pandora, including the Na’vi. ---
**Author:** ![Alessan](https://sea3.discourse-cdn.com/straightdope/user_avatar/boards.straightdope.com/alessan/32/465_2.png) [@Alessan](https://boards.straightdope.com/u/Alessan)\ **Post date:** [October 1, 2013, 4:06pm UTC](https://boards.straightdope.com/t/how-come-science-fiction-films-rarely-use-exotic-fictional-technology-anymore/669839/69 "2013-10-01T16:06:50Z")
I actually liked the fantastic elements of \*\*Avatar \*\*- they reminded me of a lot of 1970’s science fiction. In fact, the whole movie could easily have been a Roger Zelazny novella. ---
**Author:** ![Cartoonacy](https://avatars.discourse-cdn.com/v4/letter/c/848f3c/32.png) [@Cartoonacy](https://boards.straightdope.com/u/Cartoonacy)\ **Post date:** [October 1, 2013, 4:14pm UTC](https://boards.straightdope.com/t/how-come-science-fiction-films-rarely-use-exotic-fictional-technology-anymore/669839/70 "2013-10-01T16:14:26Z")
> [@Ranger\_Jeff](#): > > I’m still trying to figure out how after Ma Kent unraveled the blankets that Kal-el arrived in and wove them into Superboy/man’s costume and cape, how she managed to trim any loose threads. [Heat vision.](http://scifi.stackexchange.com/questions/22729/how-did-martha-kent-modify-the-kryptonian-blanket-that-became-supermans-costume) ---
**Author:** ![Skald\_the\_Rhymer](https://avatars.discourse-cdn.com/v4/letter/s/ecccb3/32.png) [@Skald\_the\_Rhymer](https://boards.straightdope.com/u/Skald_the_Rhymer)\ **Post date:** [October 1, 2013, 5:29pm UTC](https://boards.straightdope.com/t/how-come-science-fiction-films-rarely-use-exotic-fictional-technology-anymore/669839/71 "2013-10-01T17:29:24Z")
> [@Ranger\_Jeff](#): > > I’m still trying to figure out how after Ma Kent unraveled the blankets that Kal-el arrived in Patiently. > [@](#): > > and wove them into Superboy/man’s costume and cape, how she managed to trim any loose threads. Kal’s heat vision. In the Silver Age, non-living Kryptonian matter was not quite as durable as living. ---
**Author:** ![Rocketeer](https://sea3.discourse-cdn.com/straightdope/user_avatar/boards.straightdope.com/rocketeer/32/4437_2.png) [@Rocketeer](https://boards.straightdope.com/u/Rocketeer)\ **Post date:** [October 1, 2013, 6:18pm UTC](https://boards.straightdope.com/t/how-come-science-fiction-films-rarely-use-exotic-fictional-technology-anymore/669839/72 "2013-10-01T18:18:38Z")
> [@Half\_Man\_Half\_Wit](#): > > … I think people need to realize, especially when it comes to movies, that what they’re seeing is not necessarily intended to be a depiction of events as they actually transpired, but rather, that the pictures they’re shown aim to get across the flavor, and not just the mere content of a scene. The car blowing up in that way may not be realistic, since real cars don’t blow up that easily and spectacularly, but it’s also not necessarily meant to be; rather, the adrenaline rush produced by the depiction is intended to transport the intensity with which the characters subjectively perceived it. Well said. I’ve felt the same thing for a while now. It gets me around all sorts of niggling issues with “realism”. ---
**Author:** ![iamthewalrus\_3](https://avatars.discourse-cdn.com/v4/letter/i/258eb7/32.png) [@iamthewalrus\_3](https://boards.straightdope.com/u/iamthewalrus_3)\ **Post date:** [October 1, 2013, 7:19pm UTC](https://boards.straightdope.com/t/how-come-science-fiction-films-rarely-use-exotic-fictional-technology-anymore/669839/73 "2013-10-01T19:19:31Z")
> [@asterion](#): > > It’s called Unobtanium in the movie and people went absolutely crazy over that name. What I thought was an obvious joke for a couple reasons (it doesn’t actually matter what it is for the plot and it’s exactly the kind of name a discovering scientist would stick on such a material) angered so many people here on this board. It _is_ an obvious joke, but I think most people dislike it because it looks like lazy writing. It doesn’t help that the execrable movie _The Core_ did _the same joke_ just a few years earlier. At least they had the benefit of knowing they were a cheesy tongue-in-cheek scifi movie. ---
**Author:** ![Atomic\_Alex](https://sea3.discourse-cdn.com/straightdope/user_avatar/boards.straightdope.com/atomic_alex/32/175_2.png) [@Atomic\_Alex](https://boards.straightdope.com/u/Atomic_Alex)\ **Post date:** [October 1, 2013, 10:14pm UTC](https://boards.straightdope.com/t/how-come-science-fiction-films-rarely-use-exotic-fictional-technology-anymore/669839/74 "2013-10-01T22:14:12Z")
> [@ricksummon](#): > > I should point out that Eywa isn’t a supernatural being; she’s an intelligence inhabiting the planet-wide neural network formed by Pandora’s trees. That’s what Grace tried to tell the RDA administrator, who was basically the same character as the Evil Paul Reiser™ from _Aliens_, just played by a different actor. Sigourney Weaver, of all people, should have known this. 🙂 > > I agree, though, that Eywa intelligently designed the animal life on Pandora, including the Na’vi. Despite my lukewarm opinion of Avatar _(I liked it more than I disliked it)_ I’m actually really interested to see where Cameron takes the story with the next two sequels. I sincerly hope its a but more nuanced than the original, which I thought could have been improved by highlighting that humanity really _needed_ the Unobtanium and even better that its a clean non-polluting energy source which would help reverse the environmental degradation of Earth. On the Na’vi, while all other higher wildlife on Pandora seem to have six limbs the Na’vi have only four, perhaps suggesting that they aren’t native to Pandora and are what remains of the last interstellar species that tried to invade. [Previous page](https://boards.straightdope.com/t/how-come-science-fiction-films-rarely-use-exotic-fictional-technology-anymore/669839.md?page=3)