I don’t watch that many sci-fi/futuristic movies so I may be wrong, but, in most of those movies infantry/cavalry fight (and even win) using tactics that are somewhere between Napoleon and WWI trench warfare.
Massed infantry marching in ranks facing the same formations. Tanks/Cavalry that move with tracks/wheels but are slower than a 20th century tanks (and, when they fly/float they ares shitty planes), using trenches to move and hide. All of this while having FTL ships, energy weapons, and sensors that detect the type of lifeform from 1000 km.
Are there any sci-fi/futuristic movies where armies fight in a different, modern way?
Ditto with spaceships exchanging broadsides at visual range.
Zero Dark Thirty has a good scene during the Bin Laden raid.
Kill command has extensive use of IT integrated into sensors and weapons. You get a sense that their weapons are much more effective because they’re smarter. There’s a sense that gear and people are networked. The members of the squad actually spread out during a firefight instead of clumping up for the benefit of the camera (and incoming enemy fire).
Predator has some aspect of sophisticated warfare. Consider that this 1987 movie puts stealth and wits as above everything else. I wish the sequel had just been a military procedural of the two Predators hunting each other for 2 hours.
Heck, never mind land battles. The Death Star scenes in Star Wars were fought like the WW2 Pacific War (fighters swarming large warships and bases), and in later Star Treks you have FTL starships exchanging phaser broadsides at naked-eye visual range like it were Nelson at Trafalgar. Basically scifi TV/movie battles are all filmed in some “historic” style because we’ve jacksquat idea of what actual combat with future technologies will look like, but we’ve had a century of knowing what visual tropes from historic battles “work” on the screen.
Maybe we don’t know how they will be, but Napoleonic Square-or-Line or WWI long trenches won’t be the solution to enemies with energy weapons (There’s also a dearth of beyond line-of-sight weapons).
Marching 10,000 soldiers down a field á la US Civil War when the enemy has FTL technology is ridiculous. Also, eve though the guns are astonishingly better than ours, there are less efective than AK47 or a modern machine gun or artillery. How can they miss?
I get that the “look” is what most viewers expect, but if you know a little bit it’s jarring.
In the words of David Gerrold, this (Trek, in his case, but it could be anything else in the genre) is not really Science Fiction. It is Action-adventure, told with SF idioms. It’s not about 24th century people, it’s about 20th century people, with phasers. The producers are not going to gamble on some writer with a real SF vision of how it COULD be, if they can make bank with the tried and tested.
You can also go in the opposite direction from scifi — it is a well established phenomenon when doing “period” battle to err either in terms of anachronistic tactics or of using period tactics wrong, for the sake of the visuals (e.g. when did we last see a proper phalanx deployed?) and it can also take those who know better out of the scene.
(Of course then there’s Verhoeven Troopers where you just had mass spray-and-pray. But that was supposed to look bad, so he says.)
A lot of current works of fiction depict warfare now as being small autonomous drones with small explosive charges that blow up on specific targets but I’m curious how effective that would actually be after the initial first usage. Couldn’t you just confuse the robots by jamming all signals to them? It would require disabling your own stuff for sure but you could put up a temporary “shield” whenever you see an attack coming. Even robots that are 100% autonomous and don’t require outside command input would still rely on outside signals to coordinate with other drones and for GPS coordinates.
In terms of on screen space battles Andromeda did a reasonable job of showing battles where ranges between ships were measured in light seconds instead of kilometres. They would show an exterior shot of missiles launching then a cut to the targeted ship being hit. Almost never showing the two ships on screen at the same time. The sense of distance was also reinforced by the dialog and action on the bridge during the battles. With characters watching converging radar blips and blops that represented missiles and ships etc. And this was a show about as far from hard sci-fi as you can get.
Hell, Frank Herbert had people travel to alien plants, land, and fight each other with knives, and it worked because he gave a borderline plausible reason for it, and because it was a terrific book. Just write a good story and don’t insult my intelligence *too *much, and I’ll accept any form of warfare you want.
The term I believe you are looking for is Space Opera. Part of the problem is the fact, even though we know intellectually that sound does not carry in space, when we don’t hear the WHOOSH as the ship goes by, it doesn’t feel right.
As I recall (I don’t have them to hand) the Bobiverse series by Dennis E. Taylor has some interesting space battle scenes, based on a a fairly hard science conception of how things might actually play out in an A.I.-coordinated conflict. There’s certainly none of the nonsense of daredevil human piloting skills being involved, if I recall correctly there’s no FTL and things are governed by realistic laws of physics. The books are also very funny and entertaining.