So nobody is carrying around any sort of iPad or personal smart phone type of device. The computer screens are pixelated like it's the 80's. Useless flashing knobs on walls. This was a great re-watch throughout the 90's...but now that the technology looks dated/unlikely, does the it diminish some of the movie for you?
share[deleted]
Not at all. Why would it?
Alien takes place in its own universe.
Not at all. It was quite low-key and I liked it.
I recently watched a movie set in present time and they didn't have one mobile phone in it. I wish I could remember which film it was.
not at all. it fits the timeline and atmosphere. have you played alien isolation? they made it like this in this game as well
also, holograms are not practical. at all. if you want to know what real sci-fi is. i've read a theory that aliens oprerate spaceships with their mind alone.
I Kind of like how they communicate with "mother" just like google or Chat gpt...
shareJust wait to the end of the big AI war of 2043, and then the AI purge in 2412...
shareI always find it quite funny....the incongruency of technology in films like this. Especially films set in (what the producers feel) the future will look like. An example of this would be the original Rollerball. Set in the future. SOME futuristic concepts (like laser pistols, big screen TV's, doors that slide open top-to-bottom unnecessarily, etc....). But then you also see wood panel living rooms, shag carpet, silly "futuristic-looking" font on things like the helicopter, land line phones, etc.
Star Wars...where you have enough technology in that world to have laser pistols, light sabers, spaceships, hyperspace capability, robots that can think and have emotions and personalities, yet.....R2-D2 can't just speak English, C3P0 looks like a robot rendering from the 60's waddling around, nobody has a cell phone, the technology in the spaceships is represented by rows and rows of blinking lights, and don't even get me started on the juvenile terminology ("blasters", "The Death Star", etc.). No cyborgs. And the creatures in the cantina look like stuffed animals.
The technology in Alien is indeed VERY dated, and INCONGRUENT....for reasons the OP already stated. You see similar incongruency in the original Star Trek series. They have phasers....the ability to teleport, etc....yet there really isn't any form of modern computer in the bridge....just rows of blinking buttons and a tiny video screen with what looks like the Pong video game on it, ha ha. It's the go-to special effect to depict spaceship technology: hundreds of colorful, unlabeled, blinking buttons. (I WILL give Star Trek credit for having the foresite to depict cell phones, albeit FLIP PHONES, ha ha).
It's hard to judge these movies which are set in the future. Just like you pointed out about Star Trek. In the sixties when the series was made, no one was envisioning computer screens. What seems like "high tech" in movies made today will seem dated in a few decades.
The one thing in Alien that I question is their weapons. Dallas is taking Kane and Lambert with him to check out the signal and he says that they have to "break out the weapons."
Yet when they get back on the ship and have to get rid of the Alien which they believe is still tiny, it was up to Brett to cobble together some rudimentary weapon with a bag to catch the little Alien. Really low tech! If the Company expected them to respond to alien distress signals you'd think they'd give them something better to defend themselves with in case they encountered hostiles.
Star Trek for example inspired several generations of scientists and engineers. The flip phones are kind of a self fulfilling prophecy. It was a very short trend and was then easily dominated by the Smartphone, which looks nothing like anything predicted in Star Trek. And there are several others inventions, which are based on visions shown in Star Trek. Many scientists also clearly state that they got heir awakening thanks to Star Trek.
But why is Sci Fi so fast outdated? Because it was never ment to be realistic (most of the time). Ridley Scott for sure never expected that a space truck would look like this in the future. But he wanted to make it reliable. Back then you couldn't show effects like we are able to see since the 2000s (Minority Report). The budget for Alien is estimated at 11 Million USD, inflation corrected this is like 50 Million USD - the same budget you could nowadays e.g. could make movies like Civil War, but unlikely an effect heavy SciFi movie. 2001 had a budget of 10.5 million, which is roughly same budget as nowadays Ad Astra. But it was impossible to have "flat screens", as you couldn't even trick anything. Screen Replacements are only possible since digital composing.
Anyway, the future is either limited by budget or because it does not fit into the artistic vision.