Note that I am not talking about old sci-fi that couldn’t anticipate future tech, although that can still be quite shortsighted and/or stupid (e.g., using a slide rule in a spaceship). I’m talking about sci-fi or sci-fi-ish action movie technology that is inferior to what we have right now or what could easily be imagined.
Some examples:
• I was watching one of the dumbest movies ever made last night, Aeon Flux, and this movie featured a trope that has to be in tvtropes.org somewhere: retarded defenses that the characters need to breach. Aeon and her partner have to run through this deadly garden in order to get to this government building, and they are being shot at by these weird gourds with darts in them, and the normal-looking grass can turn into sharp spikes. And they make it through and just walk through these openings in the building. Huh? All of this could have been prevented with, you know, an electrified fence or something. And there is no one to go after them in the building (or outside, for that matter), since no one was alerted via motion detectors, cameras, etc.
• Relatedly, anything having to do with jumping through or around or dodging frickin’ LASERS. Motion detectors are a thing, as are cameras.
• Relatedly, the first Mission Impossible movie (penetrating a room with a computer) or Ocean’s Twelve (getting into a heavily guarded vault). Look, there are two ways to get into heavily guarded places:
- Inside job (look at how intel leaks actually have happened recently).
- Military assault.
- RIP, Opal.
The whole “do something clever and jump through frickin’ LASERS!” thing is sooo tired at this point. Yet virtually every action movie depends on this kind of thing. If it’s actually a military assault commensurate with the defenses, then fine (that usually involves other problems, but it’s not stupid on its face).
• Bombs are a thing! Drones are now a thing, too! If you want to kill someone, you don’t need a fancy robot or anything. Just send a small flying drone with a bomb after them and blow it up fairly close to them. Done.
• Relatedly, almost all of the military tech in the Star Wars movies is ridiculous. Example: in Revenge of the Sith, in the space battle at the beginning, there are robots that come and start gnawing on Anakin’s and Obi-Wan’s ship. Simply having these robots blow up would obliterate the ship. Done and done.
That’s what I have for now! What are your observations?