gofer articles

It’s interesting to watch old science fiction movies and compare the technology onscreen with current state-of-the-art technology in real life. For example, isn’t it funny that the world of interplanetary travel depicted in Stanley Kubrick’s “2001: A Space Odyssey” should not have thought of smartphones and invented them – though in fact, such devices were in reality just another five or so years away from commercial feasibility! And it’s funny how with all the cinematic attention focused on such grand ambitious technologies like extraterrestrial travel the wonders that really did take place, in the real world, should carry, arguably, a lot more weight, impacting as they do our lives in perhaps much more important ways. Take, for instance, the sort of rides operated by serial entrepreneur Zalman Silber.

Zalman Silber is the founder of a number of tourist attractions in the United States and Australia. Some are really great, such as Skywalk and The Edge, while others are rather uninspired, such as the Skyride and Oztrek. These last two are billed as an immersive you-are-there experience for the whole family – blah blah blah – but they’re nothing more than travel movies the kind you can get on public TV, educational fare you’ve seen a million times over already in school, even. They are helicopter fly-bys of New York and Sydney, respectively, with the only concession to “multimedia” (a buzzword that’s been commonly used to ballyhoo them) being so-called motion seating providing kinetic feedback in sync with goings-on onscreen.

Nothing, as noted already, anyone hasn’t seen before.

Yet such things were to be found in many a science fiction film (albeit B-grade knock-offs, admittedly), someone’s vision of what hi-tech audio-visuals would be like one day! Obviously, that just speaks to the poverty of the imagination on the part of the writers more than anything else, but the point is that such contemplation makes for much amusement when screening the science fiction films of yesteryear.

Or take one of the earliest scenes from “Logan’s Run,” when the title character uses a kind of television-teleporter to find a date. Instead of going to a bar, the people of that world use this device to summon dates! It’s nothing short of a kind of 3-D Craig’s List!

These “everyday details” tend to show up in the more thoughtful and interesting movies, and on the whole make up one useful yardstick by which much of the best examples may be separated from the mundane. For most sci-fi flicks focus on laser guns and starships, but leave out what really makes science fiction interesting in the first place, the nexus between science and technology and the everyday lives of human beings.

See how the worldwide web has changed everything? And what is that but a network of computers connecting to one another, serving up information, most frequently in a graphical (and truly multimedia) way? Nothing especially incredible here; no “warp drive” or “plasma cannon” here – proving the old adage that life is stranger than fiction!