Videotapes. CRT monitors (in about ten years they’ll be absolute dead giveaways that a film is from before 2005).
Speaking of 2010, films that date themselves. My favorite example is a Kari Wuhrer B movie called “Fatal Conflict.” It has a transition scene with text overprinted saying: “2030: Argos Women’s Prison Colony.” It was made in 1998. So the film’s creators obviously had given deep thought to their future world and decided that within 30 years we would have discovered FTL travel and set up colonies on other planets. But the thing that really floored me was the notion that the first thing we would do in outer space is establish women’s prisons. Now, that’s thinking things through!:rolleyes:
Totally agree about the idiocy of setting very futuristic movies just a couple decades in the future…even Blade Runner, despite being excellent otherwise, fell into that trap.
As for the product logos and anachronistic cell phones and such…I think in a few years you may see more recent movies having those details digitally updated.
Well, Metropolis(1927) suffers from this. I was impressed by most of the special effects in the film, particulary in light of the fact Film was still realitivly new at that point. The movie features rather interesting Art Deco futuristic buildings with Sumerian/Babaloyian references around. That didn’t bug me(Probably because I rather like art deco) but the one thing that stands out was one scene shows Biplanes flying about. It wouldn’t have bugged me if they had at least attempted to make it look futuristic, but Biplanes were on the way out around that time, IIRC.
Still a great movie, even though the whole Labor Union thing is probablt the most dated thing about it. I am glad that they didn’t just rubber stamp the labor movement, showing they can go too far as well.
HPL - I meant airplanes themselves. Not just the style of airplanes. From my limited knowledge of the air industry it’s been almost impossible for an airline to turn a long term profit since deregulation almost 30 years ago. The last year has of course been especially bad. It wouldn’t be totally inconceivable for a new form of high speed travel to gain a substantial enough foothold in the next 100 years to completely oust the airplane (or what is our current conception of it.)
I am SO looking forward to those finally becoming uncool. Does anybody actually enjoy watching the little animation introducing the logo of one of the companies that produced the film/tv show/computer game/video game?
I do, sometimes. I used to like that one for the CBS movie of the week back in the '80s when I was a kid…or maybe it was NBC, anyway, it was really impressive for it’s time. There have been a few other computer-animated logos that I thought were cool.
I re-watched Blade Runner again and ran into the same thing - considering the state of the world around 1980, I thought it was pretty silly to suppose there would be colonies on other planets and space battles in only 40 years. Now that Blade Runner is set only 17 years in our future it’s even sillier. Also. I could look past the dated computer screens as technological limitations of the times, but the architecture inside the building they fight in at the end is obviously from at least the middle of the 20th century, yet the exterior shots of the building make it something that had to have been made in the future due ot it’s sheer size. This was also a problem I had with Alien 3, I decided it must be set in an alternate universe where space was colonized in the 1940s when I saw the plumbing fixtures on the prison colony.
In Seven, the end credits roll down instead of up. Probably a vain attempt to make people feel that time was flowing backwards and that there was some hope that the last two hours of their lives might be reclaimable, somehow.
I don’t think that’s what SolGrundy meant, though-- it’s not like there was a proliferation of “backwards” credits in the mid-nineties.
Stuff like that’s ok – it’s short. The stuff I don’t like is when the wizz-bang guys get carried away with their ingenuity leading to, like** Dryga_Yes** said: “lasers shooting at a block of marble so chunks of rock are thrown at the monitor making it shake a bit, then the remaining pieces form the name of the company. And then the chunks turn liquid and form a puddle on the floor. And then the puddle starts to take on human form a la Terminator 2, and then the liquid human-guy runs away from the screen. And then there’s a big explosion.”
They shouldn’t have told us what the date was. When you try to tie your imaginary world into our real world with specific dates it’s going to hurt the suspension of disbelief if you choose dates that don’t fit in with the movie. For instance, if ‘The Fellowship of the Ring’ started with the text ‘The Shire, 3547 BC’, people would be right to ask a lot of questions about the apparent anachronisms.
They could have avoided this by not giving a date at all, giving a more realistic date (i.e. ‘Los Angeles - 2119 AD’), or by trying to offer some explanation as to why technology seems so advanced in some ways, i.e. explain that cheap and practical antigravity and FTL travel were discovered in the 1980s which lead to a period of rapid expansion and technological advancement which leads to the world presented as Los Angeles in 2019 AD. Still wouldn’t explain the buildings that are huge on the outside and old-fashioned and mostly abandoned on the inside (the novel explained this better, nuclear war and emigration to off-world colonies depopulated the Earth, but I don’t think it was tied to a specific year, and as I recall it was written in the 50s or 60s).
Yeah, I meant the whole distressed film popping around in the projector, with the text scratched into the negative and going blurry and all that, all while Nine Inch Nails music is blaring in the background. It definitely felt like every movie & music video was doing that kind of thing, although right now the only other ones I can think of are Spawn and The House on Haunted Hill.
This outrage will not stand! Pistols at dawn, sir!
Actually, though I’ll admit it threw me a little at first, it was pretty clear to me as I read your posts (you can understand my curiosity) that your intentions are pure. Welcome to the boards, etc.!
Didn’t mean to rip off an already established poster