6 Technologies Conspicuously Absent from Sci-Fi Movies

6 Every Post-Apocalyptic Film -- Bicycles (Seriously)

We've seen it in The Road, Terminator Salvation, Dawn of the Dead, Book of Eli, The Walking Dead, Mad Max, Falling Skies and many, many others. One of the main problems of living in a post-apocalyptic wasteland is that the survivors have to be constantly on the move, because otherwise it would just be two hours of watching people slowly die.

Whether they're trying to reach some sort of fabled vestige of civilization, looking for resources or simply trying not to be eaten by zombies, the survivors are always moving from point A to point B, and that means either walking over insane stretches of possibly radioactive desolation or fighting other people for gas. That's just the way it is, though, because if the whole world has gone to shit, how else are you gonna get around?

So What's Missing?

How about grabbing a bike? In most of these films, there always seems to be a gap between having a vehicle and gas and being shit out of luck, as if no other possibility existed.

Why don't they ride bikes? Did all the zombies eat them? Did the nukes somehow specifically target bicycles but miss all the cars? Bikes are cheap, fast and easy to maintain, plus they require no fuel and they're freaking everywhere -- literally the only reason we can think of for why they are never used in these films is that they would look kinda ridiculous.

In The Road and Book of Eli, the protagonists spend pretty much the whole movie walking across hostile territory and never so much as consider looking for some bikes. It's like they never even existed. And before you tell us that Eli wouldn't be able to ride a bike due to his condition -- if you can aim a bow and arrow and win a machete fight, you can ride a damn bike.

Not only are bikes considerably faster than walking -- the average human walking speed is roughly 3 mph, and the same effort applied on a bike is 15 mph -- but they are also much more discreet than cars. In Terminator Salvation, the characters can rarely get into vehicles without attracting giant murder robots, which you'd think would at least make them consider building some bicycles out of Terminator scrap parts.

In The Walking Dead, the Dawn of the Dead remake and pretty much every zombie film ever, the protagonists use motorized vehicles to get around, and they inevitably break down, leaving the characters to run. Again, there is no situation in which traveling by bike or at least keeping one strapped to the roof of the car wouldn't be beneficial.

How It Would Have Changed Things:

In Dawn of the Dead, they actually show a character riding a bike inside the mall, but as soon as the characters are forced to leave the place, they completely forget such a thing exists. Given the traveling speeds we showed you before, using bikes instead of running away by foot would have made them exactly five times less likely to be torn to shreds.

In Terminator Salvation, guess what the young Kyle Reese was doing when he was captured by the robots: arguing over gas. Had Marcus, Kyle and the other kid traveled on bikes (or possibly one of those three-seat tandem deals) there would be no need to stop for gas and it would have been a completely different movie from then on.

The biggest difference would have been made in films like Book of Eli and The Road: Had people thought to utilize bikes, every grueling journey would have been much faster and therefore much easier, and in the case of The Road, much less likely to make the audience want to die.

5 Aliens, Doom and Event Horizon -- Night-Vision Goggles

You know the drill: some kind of outer space operation suddenly stops transmitting and we have to send our finest marines/salvage crew/the Rock to go find out what happened, only to run into a nightmarish creature lurking inside a series of dark corridors. This appears to be a common problem for future space explorers -- and why wouldn't it be? Space is pretty large, and we can imagine that for every E.T. in the sky there is bound to be a Predator as well.

Movies like Aliens, Doom and Event Horizon have taught us that while sending things like satellites and scientific rovers into space is important, it can't hurt to toss in a few flamethrowers as well (not that it will do much good in the end).

So What's Missing?

You know what else might be helpful out there, future space travelers? Some night-vision goggles. Or, you know, anything more powerful than a bunch of crappy flashlights.

How many times have we seen the same situation? The crew is walking in the dark with little more than a Game Boy to light the way, then something jumps out of nowhere and fucks them up. But the thing is: Why would they have to walk blind in the first place?

The reason we bring up Aliens, Doom and Event Horizon is that in each of those films, the space crew knows they're gonna be walking into places where there's possibly no power and a threat to their lives. For some reason, however, these futuristic humans are always way less prepared to fight in the dark than, say, the Taliban. It's as if night-vision technology had never been invented.

In both Aliens and Doom, we're talking about highly trained marines armed to the motherfucking teeth and knowingly going into hostile ground. In Event Horizon, it's a salvage crew specifically trained to work in dark, abandoned ships. It's even worse in Aliens because thanks to Ripley, they know exactly what they're going to find in the death-ridden planet, but apparently she didn't mention how utterly dark it was gonna be.

What's the problem with using night vision? Too bulky? You know what else is bulky, guys? A dead space marine. In Aliens, we actually see them flip down an infrared lens on their helmets in one scene and it doesn't look inconvenient in the least. They scrap using the infrared because they find out that the aliens don't show up on it ... but there's no reason why they wouldn't show up in night vision.

Look, we know these are horror films, but there's a big difference between some teenage girl having to use a small cellphone light because the power went off and a group of trained marines jumping after a mutant into a sewer hole with shitty flashlights taped to their guns.

How It Would Have Changed Things:

First of all, there's the obvious psychological effect of having to deal with the darkness in general. Forget the aliens and ghosts and that shit -- a big dark tomb in space is enough to drive someone up the wall. This would have made the biggest difference in Event Horizon, where the whole film revolves around the characters slowly losing their minds in that depressing, poorly lit ship. Night vision or perhaps even a few lamps here and there would have done wonders to improve the ambience and generally made things more cheerful for the crew.

In Doom, one character is killed off due a flashlight malfunction, which shouldn't even be an issue. It seems that in both Doom and Aliens, the monsters' entire strategy is based on the idea that their prey can't see shit, often hiding in plain sight and blending in with the walls, probably snickering at the incompetence of their foes. However, if they tried to do that in a well-lit environment, there's no doubt that the tables would be turned.

4 Avatar -- Unmanned Combat Vehicles

Avatar is set on a distant alien world (Pandora) in 2154. The human technology we do see revolves mostly around military and scientific equipment: big flying ships that spit out little flying ships, cool guns and of course your standard James Cameron giant robot murder suit.

Oh, and then there's the machine that essentially allows people to remotely control large blue warriors (Avatars) for lengthy periods of time. In the film, the humans want to steal Pandora's natural resources, but in the end the native Na'vi manage to kick us out with some help from the few nongreedy earthlings and the planet's mystical forces.

So What's Missing?

Actually, the Na'vi won because the humans are idiots. Those giant killbots are pretty cool and all, but they have one glaring design flaw:

That's literally how the evil Colonel Quaritch dies: someone cracks the glass in his robot suit and shoots an arrow in his chest, an eventuality no one could have predicted. Even if they had, why would the humans have to go out into a toxic atmosphere and fight the Na'vi themselves? Why not just send remote-controlled combat drones like, you know, the ones that have existed since 1995? Instead, they're wearing fucking oxygen masks and paying for an army of mercenaries to hyper-sleep all the way to Pandora and fight an enemy whose only hope for victory is getting close enough to stab you.

This gets even more ridiculous when you consider that in this future we have the technology to control organic beings from insane distances ... but no one has figured out how to do the same thing with weapons, apparently. Throughout the entire movie, we do see one remote-controlled machine -- but they're using it to cut down a tree.

As for why they didn't send an army of battle-capable Avatars to fight the Na'vi: at one point Colonel Quaritch called them a "bad joke" and the people controlling them a "bunch of limp-dick science majors." Apparently the higher-ups agreed with him, and that's why these powerful warriors appear to be used exclusively for diplomacy and intel-gathering.

How It Would Have Changed Things:

Basically, the Na'vi would have been massacred and all the unobtainium would have been obtained. In short, a happy ending for mankind.

During the final battle, the human forces are unable to use missile guidance or radar technology due to some magnetic hogwash going on in that particular area of Pandora -- but guess what does work? Those "limp-dick" Avatars. Presumably, remote control and UAV technology would be usable as well ... had the humans thought to use it.

So, instead of becoming completely useless the moment an arrow hits the soft spot in their chests, the giant robots would have lumbered back up and kept going had they no internal human operator. And even if the Na'vi were somehow able to stop the first attack, the humans would have still walked away alive and able to fight another day because they would have never actually been anywhere near the battle.

3 Minority Report -- Wireless Internet

Minority Report is set in a future in which cops have figured out a way to stop crimes before they even happen, thus making their jobs approximately 8,000 percent easier. But that's not all: It appears that by the year 2054, our ability to shrink hardware and data has gotten so advanced that you can't even see it. Take a look at the part when Tom Cruise and his murder-predicting cop buddies are transferring data from one computer to another:

Check that shit out! That's one of their portable storage devices and it's completely clear, like fucking air -- that's how advanced we've become!

So What's Missing?

Wait a minute, so they're using a portable device to transfer information to another computer that's right there? Even in the year 2002, when this movie came out, we already had the ability to do the exact same thing considerably faster thanks to a little thing called Wi-Fi. You'd think that by 2054 portable devices, even cool ones that look like air, wouldn't even be necessary -- you know what else looks like air? Air.

Throughout this entire film, there seems to be a complete lack of anything resembling Wi-Fi or networking abilities. If the cops want a file that's on another computer, they have to physically go and get it. What is this, Dragnet? When Tom Cruise needs certain records about a specific prediction, he literally has to walk down to the prison and order the warden to show him the video, then walk once more to another kiosk in order to get more information on that specific prisoner.

If we took that exact same situation and put in the present, it would probably look like this:

But this isn't just an office. This is a police force that sometimes has only minutes to pre-solve these pre-crimes -- and yet they waste valuable seconds passing huge transparent flash drives from one computer to another before the information can be analyzed. Why not just connect the computers to the same network or, you know, grab a 5-foot-long Ethernet cable from whatever has replaced RadioShack in the future? Even that would be faster than the way they're doing it.

How It Would Have Changed Things:

Most of the pre-crimes we see in the film are stopped literally a few seconds before they were supposed to happen -- when the police arrive in time to stop them. At the end of the film, the cops arrive instants after the bad guy has committed suicide, which in turn results in the whole pre-crime division getting shut down. In this case, Wi-Fi would have actually changed the entire ending of the movie.

2 Blade Runner, A.I. and I, Robot -- GPS Tracking

We've seen the same basic premise in movies like Blade Runner, A.I. and even I, Robot -- a somehow humanlike machine decides to escape and the humans must find it fast, for whatever reason. In I, Robot, the whole first part of the movie is about Will Smith chasing an android who supposedly committed a murder. At one point he has to find the alleged robo-murderer in a warehouse filled with a thousand other identical robots.

In Blade Runner and A.I., finding the missing androids is literally the whole plot of the film. In Blade Runner, Harrison Ford has to find the replicants because they are dangerous lunatics, and in A.I., the robot kid on the run is actually an invaluable prototype. In both cases, the quest to find the androids is long and hard, giving the filmmakers plenty of time to ponder philosophical questions like, "At what point does artificial intelligence become real intelligence?" and "Is it legal for Jude Law's pants to be so tight near a small child?"

So What's Missing?

Every time a robot runs away in these movies, the companies that own them are caught completely off guard by it, as if they weren't the ones who put legs into the damn things. What they did not build into them, for inexplicable reasons, is a simple GPS tracker.

Think about it. We can track anything from cellphones to pets using GPS technology -- and yet in A.I., once the robot kid and his gigolo buddy go into the woods, the humans admit they have no clue where they are. We're talking about a film made in 2001, long after the invention of GPS, but for some reason no one in this future has heard of it. The worst part is that the woods are literally filled with missing runaway robots, so it's not like this is the first time it has happened.

In I, Robot, the killer android Will Smith has to find is part of a batch of brand-new service robots made with cutting-edge technology -- which, again, doesn't seem to include any method for finding them if they go missing. The robot simply runs away from the murder scene and it's like he vanished from existence. If it wasn't for the fact that it was damaged and needed a place to repair itself, it could have simply kept running in a straight line until Will Smith died of old age.

Blade Runner sort of gets a pass on this stuff because GPS technology wasn't as widespread when the film came out in 1982 -- but even back then there were other methods to track really important things. The company that owned the replicants knew they were dangerous and restricted their usage to off-planet colonies ... but never thought to keep track of these highly advanced robots by any means other than "sending some dude to chase them."

How It Would Have Changed Things:

In I, Robot, we would have been spared more than just the chase sequence at the beginning. If Will Smith had simply tried to GPS the robot ... he would have found out that it was specifically built to be undetectable by the main computer (and presumably other forms of tracking) as part of the dead guy's plan to expose the robo-conspiracy. In the movie, it takes him like an extra hour of screen time to make that same discovery.

In A.I., the whole second act onward is about the kid being brought in to be dismantled, running away, meeting the Jude Law character and ... something about ... aliens. All that crap? Averted when the company locates the boy five minutes after it went missing and reuses the parts to build a Danish woman or something. As for Blade Runner, there would be no movie. It would be two hours of Harrison Ford eating Chinese food and contemplating making love to his vacuum cleaner, probably.

1 X-Men -- Cellular Phones

According to the first film (released in 2000), the nonprequel X-Men movies take place in the "not too distant future," a time when people who shoot lasers out of their eyeballs don't seem quite as shocking to the world as they would now. While regular humans continue using the same boring technology we have now, we see mutants flying around in futuristic jets, using holographic "danger rooms" to practice their magical powers and driving badass super cars.

So these "people" can not only control our minds and metal-based patio furniture, but they also get all the good tech? Assholes!

So What's Missing?

Cellphones, or any other form of long distance communication invented after the '60s, for that matter. Seriously -- when you think about it, the plots of the X-Men films are as reliant on the idea that no one is in possession of a mobile phone as an episode of Seinfeld.

It's not like they don't exist in this universe: In the first film, we see Senator Kelly chatting it up on a cellphone before he gets kidnapped, so it would be safe to assume that the X-Men would have access to at least the same type of technology, right? No, apparently they don't. For half of X2, the characters remain separated because, despite their fantastic powers and technology, they simply can't get through to each other.

Storm is seen tapping into the communications on that superjet we mentioned earlier -- she appears to be switching channels and states: "Nobody is responding ... I can't get a signal." By the way, this is the equipment she's using:

A freakin' radio. That's literally the best they ever do with long distance communication in the whole series. The gaping cellphone shaped hole in the X-Men's universe would be easy enough to ignore if it weren't for this:

That is the cellphone-looking device Wolverine uses to try to communicate with the rest of the team after they're separated in X2. But rather than functioning like an actual cellphone, it doesn't seem to have any buttons, and when he tries to use it, all he gets is static. When Wolverine gets into closer proximity to Storm and the others, his "phone" begins to ring and he is able to communicate with the radio frequency the jet is using ... and only the jet. At this point it becomes clear that the device Wolverine had been carrying the whole film -- the one that the filmmakers seem to have designed to look like a cell phone -- was actually a fancy-looking walkie-talkie.

Maybe there's some deleted scene where the X-Men explain that they've intentionally decided to steer clear of cellphones because they're traceable. Except the FCC and FAA are more than capable of tracing and tapping radio waves as well, which they totally do in X2. Two jets meet up with the X-Men jet and are instantly listening in and broadcasting into their channel before shooting them down.

So to recap, the filmmakers actively remind us of the existence of cellphone technology while refusing to give our heroes access to it. This leaves, "the filmmakers are screwing with us" as the only remaining logical explanation.

How It Would Have Changed Things:

All three films involve situations where the simple ability to talk on the phone might have averted a disaster (for example: every time Rogue runs away and gets in trouble), but the second one takes the prize.

Much of the plot of X2 hinges on everyone's inability to communicate with people that aren't standing right there -- since Wolverine can't get the shitty walkie-talkie to work after the mansion is attacked, he decides to drive all the way to Boston to Iceman's house, along with Rogue and Pyro. At this point Iceman's brother calls the police ...

... who shoot Wolverine in the head, causing Pyro to go completely berserk -- thus taking his first step into the dark side. Later, during the climatic sequence at the dam, Rogue, Iceman and Pyro are waiting in the jet but start getting restless because they haven't heard from the rest of the team. Rather than calling them, Pyro decides to go out and find everyone -- finding Magneto instead, and being persuaded into joining his side. By the third film, Pyro is completely evil, and it all happens because superheroes don't carry phones.

And see how else Hollywood grossly misuses technology in 6 Baffling Flaws in Famous Sci-Fi Technology. Or check out what we'd be doing if old-timey tech was still around in If The Modern World Ran On Medieval Technology.

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