Ten Tech Movies: From Boomers to Gen Z

Here’s a quick capsule of some movies from the last few decades where technology plays more than a deuteragonist. Perhaps, a contagonist? Find out ‘which one’ when you watch them (This is not a ranking, just a listicle, so you can debate about the top-slot all you want).

1. Click:

No. Adam Sandler is not all about American Pies. He has also played this workaholic architect Michael Newman here who stumbles upon a magic remote-control that allows him to play his life at the speed and volume he wants. Does he pause? Does he rewind? Not at first. Like most of us fools running on the tread-mills of life, he simply fast-forwards the moments with his wife, his children, his father and so on – thinking they are distractions and interruptions in his career-elevator. And what happens? Does he achieve what he was after? At what cost? What happens when he rewinds his life when he is unable to even identify what his relationships are and why? This movie can be a comedy or a tragedy or a wake-up button. Press it someday.

2. Arrival:

Ok, admitted! There is only a Mothership full of aliens in this story. No in-your-face track of technology anywhere. But look closer. It is about a Linguist Louise Banks (played by Amy Adams) who steps forth to understand the language of a species that is completely strange for humans. This movie tells us that language is so much more than words or grammar. It is about nuances, context, the subtext and – sometimes- even the intent. Language can change strangers into enemies, or vice versa or even- enemies into friends. Something today’s LLM-makers can pick a page out from.

3. The Social Dilemma:

Director Jeff Orlowski sounded an alarm on the dangers of human minds being controlled by algorithms and manipulated by social media in a very no-punches-pulled way. Is it a documentary or a drama? Doesn’t matter. As one line says- “There are only two industries that refer to their customers as 'users': illegal drugs and software.” This 2020 effort tells us how. And also tells us why.

4. The Social Network:

While we are at the word ‘social’, how can we forget talking about the Jesse Eisenberg-starrer ‘the Social Network’ who essayed Mark Zuckerberg’s journey-in all grey pixels- and accompanied by the dashing Sean Parker on this interestingly-chequered ride. Bonus- You get to see Justin Timberlake. And in a different avatar.

5. In Time:

Speaking of Justin Timberlake, have you ever watched him as a factory-worker earning, and spending, the currency of a dystopian future where people stop aging after 25 and can live if they can buy something that is really scarce and, hence, precious: the currency is ‘Time’. Yes, he does that as Will Sales in this interesting plot ‘In Time’ written and directed by Andrew Niccol. Makes you think why and why not we have started thinking of time as something that is ‘money’ but not fungible. And how that defines our life and our choices.

6. Free Guy:

The choices we make, huh! Another movie that lets us contemplate precisely that, but in a fun way, is ‘free Guy’ where we are taken inside a video-game – an alternate world where we zoom in on the life of someone rarely given attention to in a game (and outside). He is named, well, just that – Guy. Because he is a NPC. A Non-Player Character. Who lives and repeats his life in a harmless but uneventful way till some events and people make him realise who he is or should be. Being a NPC is comfortable. But that’s not what makes a good movie. Or a good life. Right?

7. Ready Player One:

If Steven Spielberg has a spiel about these digital parallel universes, how can it be ignored? And so we also have ‘Ready Player One’ on this list where the creator of a virtual reality world posthumously challenges its gamers to find something elusive and ‘Easter’. Is it a treasure-hunt? Or a chance to escape into something safer when dystopia collapses humanity? Who knows?

8. Transcendence:

Who knows! That’s what this scientist’s life signifies when the quest to create a sentient machine -that packs everything ever-known- turns into a labyrinth of power, twists, evolution questions about God and the irony of naysayers turning into exploiters. This movie has Johnny Depp as the main lead and Elon Musk in a cameo as self. That’s trivia 1. And its cinematographer Wally Pfister apparently chose traditional photo-chemical processes instead of digital alternatives. That’s trivia no. 2. Wally has worked on many projects with Christopher Nolan. Trivia no. 3. Projects where he used IMAX technology and 5-perf 65 mm. A love-hate relationship with technology, you see. May be that’s what trickles into his directorial debut.

9. BlackBerry:

It was right there. A juicy plot. With all the makings of a movie. iPhone as the villain or as the dark horse pulling the rug away from under the hero that ruled in the hands of almost every suit in every office in every meeting for a seemingly-eternal period. Director Matt Johnson may have been criticised for skipping the parts of Android’s role in Research in Motion’s downhill ride; but the movie was still able to capture the arrogance, capitalist greed and corporate myopia of this sentence quite well “Why would anybody want a phone without a keyboard?”

10. Her:

Why would anyone fall in love with a Voice? How could they think of this in 2013! But Spike Jonze did that, and so well, so delicately, yet bravely, when he wrote and directed ‘Her’. And got Joaquin Phoenix to play a lonely –handwritten-letter writer (yes, that’s a profession that pays in this era he lives in) who falls in love with an AI OS that talks to him, listens to him and understands him like a soul-mate. Where does this love story go? Where can it go if the person he loves is nothing but a computer code- talking to many others like him and evolving so fast that he would not be able to keep up with her for long? Does he find love? In what form?

The list, and these questions, can go on. There was ‘The Net’ way back in 1995 starring the lovely-and-brilliant Sandra Bullock fighting a Gatekeeper system and hinting about the dangers of privacy and data ethics when the world was still working with pen-drives and disks. There’s ‘The Circle’ in 2017 raising similar questions about ethics and privacy through tech-corporate characters played by Emma Watson and ever-so-brilliant Tom Hanks. And, of course, so many Fast & Furious or Mission Impossible plots where self-driving cars, AI, quantum computers are either to be saved from falling in the wrong hands or fought ferociously. There is also a Snowden. There’s Jobs. And many bio-graphish stories out there that distill what technology legends thought or missed thinking about at the right time. Catch them. Chew upon them. And tell us which ones left you awake with an eerie hangover. More - when we meet in the next listicle.