6 Sci-Fi Movie Technologies That Went Stupidly Backwards

The Earth isn't that defenseless now, let alone 200 years in the future. If Nero showed up today, we have tanks, nuclear weapons, drones, guns, and ... uh ... several hundred types of karate? In Star Trek, it's all the responsibility of a few starships (which are all away on missions) and this stupid defense system. Your debit card right now has better security than the entire planet in the 23rd century.

Sure, the hologram obviously utilizes some advanced technology, but all of its basic requirements could be fulfilled by a voicemail. The doctor wanted Will to investigate the robots and discover their evil intentions, but why turn that into a series of word puzzles? Wouldn't most robot-hating detectives be perfectly willing to look into an uprising of terrorist murderbots without a hologram of a dead guy winking at them and leading them toward a fun mystery?

And the cuteness does not pay off. The robots take over before Smith manages to unravel much of anything. A piece of paper that said "Kill all the robots, like right now" would have solved every problem Act 1 presented. The movie attempts to explain this away by saying that the evil AI, VIKI, was holding Lanning hostage in his apartment, but that makes the fact that he created a pointlessly complicated avatar MORE dumb, not less.

For starters, modern phone technology gives you infinitely more freedom while you talk. Right now, you can share a video call while you walk around, or sexily point the camera down your pants. In Total Recall, you have to stay in one spot with your hand glued to a window. Do you have any idea how flexible you have to be to get your genitals into the frame from that position? With one of those, you're either looking at the taint of the world's greatest yoga master or your phone call is rated G.

And forget how everyone nearby gets to see and hear your conversation. Where is the camera? Does the guy on the other end also have his hand pressed up against some department store's window? And what happens when you need to reboot your phone? Do you have to go to a surgeon and carve it out every time, or can you slap your hand against something hard a few times? And let's not look past how you'll be talking to everyone with the exact same device you use to masturbate. It's like answering a video call from your mother on your fleshlight.

Wouldn't that mean every jacket is really a size XXXXL squeezed down to fit you by mechanized jacket-squeezing robotics? Wouldn't that be heavy? Way too warm? Prone to deadly constriction-related accidents when exposed to rain? You know what might be nicer? A regular jacket already in your size. And that's before we even get into the "My shoes crippled my feet" class-action lawsuits. Marty's shoes do not seem gentle when they crank down on his foot without warning or provocation. If one of your toes is bent the wrong way in this 2015, your future-shoe is going to snap it off and vent the pulped bone and flesh out its waste ports.

And you have to sit through a flash intro before you can use it.

And this movie came out in 2001, when search engines definitely existed. There were television commercials for a website where you could ask an internet butler to find things for you. And yet while the regular world could ask Jeeves the location of both of Cindy Margolis' tits for free, the robots of the future were stuck pumping quarters into an idiot mall kiosk with the deductive reasoning of barely one of Cindy Margolis' tits.

And that doesn't even account for the dangers of evil virtual intruders deleting all your files. Something Douglas encounters when a skeleton wearing Demi Moore's headshot hacks into the system and attacks his cabinets.

Similar VR storage systems exist in almost every '90s movie about technology. Something about that decade really made us think the future would involve crawling into our computers and manually carrying files around. The Lawnmower Man and Johnny Mnemonic took it a step further and added a bunch of random unlabeled shapes to their interfaces, accurately predicting that all modern hard drives would be cluttered with useless, floating 20-sided dice.

And if you think file storage was ridiculous, hoo boy, wait'll you see what they thought sex was going to be like. '90s movies were absolutely certain that the cyber-future of sex was chaotic flashes of elbows and nipples, Trapper Keeper landscapes, and featureless chrome monsters embracing. Picture rubbing up against a mouth-like area of a silvery fractal man amidst lovescapes of bouncing polyhedrons. You know what, why don't we leave you with a shot of it? Warning: EXTREMELY NSFW.

Nathan Kamal lives in Oregon and writes there. He co-founded Asymmetry Fiction http://www.asymmetryfiction.com for all your fiction needs. Jordan Breeding is a part-time writer, a full-time lover, and an all-the-time guitarist.

Also check out 7 Famous Sci-Fi Inventions With Huge Flaws The Movies Ignore and 6 Pieces of Sci-Fi Technology That Make No Sense.

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