Friday, January 08, 2010

Movies that jump the technological shark

I just saw the second half of the 2005 Jodie Foster movie "Flightplan". I knew the set up, and was curious to see the explanation for where the missing kid had disappeared on the plane.

I hadn't realised that the script would solve that problem by pretending that a plane somewhat resembling the new Airbus A 380 would have absolutely cavernous amounts of open space both above and below the passenger decks. It was so ridiculous, this internal design of the aircraft, that the movie just plummeted into a black hole of implausibility so overwhelming that I found it impossible to believe that any viewer could have found it engaging. Do people really think the hidden nooks and crannies on a passenger plane look something like a standing inside a Zeppelin?

Looking at the summaries of reviews at Rottentomatoes, it would seem that critic Mark Ramsey similarly found this the defining feature of the film:
It's an obscenely big plane. "Where is my daughter?!" asks Jodie. "Did you search the plane's tennis courts? The plane's new ballpark? Get me this plane's governor! NOW!
It's not often that technological ludicrousness ruins a movie for me. I mean, I'm not one of those people who likes to be overly analytical and worry about the fact that in Star Wars we can hear an explosion in space, or some such. Sometimes things are a bit silly and laughable but are sort of dramatically right, and you don't come away thinking that movie was ruined. But other times, that just doesn't work, and I can think of 2 movies in which technological silliness smacked me in the face so hard I could no longer enjoy it:

GoldenEye: no it wasn't the laser in a watch. Yes, ridiculous I know, but impossibly powerful gadgets had been in many of the Bond films for many years and I can overlook them. What I couldn't forgive was the absolutely 100% gold-plated absurd idea that a satellite weapon would have to be controlled by an antenna the size of the Arecibo Observatory, (of course, it was the Arecibo Observatory used in the film,) which also had to be hidden in a fake lake! I mean, even in 1995, satellite telephones were already in use with small laptop sized antennas, and even smaller handsets were in the pipeline. The satellite in question was not orbiting Pluto, for crying out loud; to use EMP it had to be in low earth orbit, not even geosynchronous orbit. What an inexcusably weak excuse for getting an interesting location into a movie. Didn't anyone point out this made no technological sense at all?

For some reason, it seems that every few months my mind goes back to GoldenEye and how annoyed I was at this incredibly stupid plot point. Maybe therapy is called for. Send me money someone, I will put it to good use.

Armageddon: to the best of my knowledge, this is by far the biggest collection of stupid, wrong, or improbable space science stuff ever assembled into one loud movie. Too many things wrong to possibly list. As Phil Plait wrote:
Here's the short version: "Armageddon" got some astronomy right. For example, there is an asteroid in the movie, and asteroids do indeed exist. And then there was... um... well, you know... um. Okay, so that was about all they got right.
Any reader with a different favourite example of a silly bit of technology that ruined a movie, you are welcome to share.

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