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11 Classic Depictions of Technology in Film
By Tony Kontzer on 2009-05-27


The recent release—and smashing success—of the new Star Trek and Terminator films has given techies a reason to rejoice. It’s no secret why IT folks flock to sci-fi movies: They love to see how Hollywood depicts the evolution of technology. It’s like a really entertaining trade show that gives them a glimpse of the future.

In that spirit, we present some films that are famous, in part, because of the importance IT played in their plots. And no, we’re not aware of any films that will show you how to get the most out of cloud computing. (The titles here are in reverse chronological order, starting with the most recent film.)
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Roundly criticized by tech sticklers for playing fast and loose with the laws of technology, this Steven Spielberg thriller made its mark with a chilling vision of the dangers of iris scanning, as well as the laughable sight of Tom Cruise navigating a virtual reality interface.

The timing, during the build-up to Y2K, couldn’t have been better. Disaffected cubicle-monkeys create a program that will trickle unaccounted-for pennies into a secret bank account. One can only wonder if Bernie Madoff found inspiration here.

This trifle is reviled by techies for its cartoonish presentation of how e-mail works, but if there’s any chance that the film’s relentless onslaught of “You’ve got mail!” declarations had anything to do with AOL’s steady fall from dominance, then we owe it our thanks.

No discussion of IT in film would be complete without the Borg. A nightmarish blending of technology and flesh, the Borg are everything we fear tech could become: independent, aggressive, coordinated, and consuming of other life forms. In other words, a bit like Larry Ellison.

Viewers giggled at the ease with which Will Smith and Jeff Goldblum upload a virus into the mother ship of a super-advanced species, but the film coincided with the earliest instances of viruses in common applications, and the thought of one saving mankind was heartwarming.

A marvel of IT shows up and kills everything in its path, operating with ruthless efficiency and unceasing persistence. Then an alleged upgrade arrives, but everyone hates it enough to make the original seem cuddly. Hint: It’s not the story of Windows Vista.

Anyone trapped in a world of jargon and bureaucracy can relate to this film’s procrastinating protagonist, Sam Lowry, as he battles a post-apocalyptic government’s dreaded bureaucratic triumvirate: Information Retrieval, Information Processing and Information Adjustments.

A young computer whiz (played by Matthew Broderick) stumbles into the U.S. defense network and triggers a game that could lead to World War III, foreshadowing of the age of hackers. We could have done without Broderick reading aloud everything he types, though.

In this strange piece of Disney pop, a crack video game programmer (Jeff Bridges) is zapped into a game, where he fights a life-and-death battle against the dreaded Master Control Program. Sounds like a typical day in IT.

“Replicants” manufactured to do menial work on off-Earth colonies escape and attempt to have lives of their own, only to be hunted down before they can understand why they were invented in the first place. If your ERP system ran off to find itself, you’d want to hunt it down, too.

The standard against which ships’ computers in space films are measured is the iconic Hal 9000, essentially the main character in Stanley Kubrick’s classic flick. Human-like down to his flaws, Hal showed the promise and danger of technologies (and movies) to come.

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