10 Movies That Actually Got Technology Right

It's practically a universal law that people in certain jobs don't watch movies or TV shows about their own professions. Cops don't watch cop shows. Nurses avoid hospital-based dramas. I imagine sanitation workers don't watch film about garbage collection.

Why? Watching something you're so familiar with is painful when they get it wrong. It pulls you right out of the story.

I'd say it might be even worse for people who work in technology, but these days, we all work in or around technology. Anyone who watches a CSI-type show and doesn't roll their eyes at the old "enhance that image!" line to read the obscure license plate has never seen a pixelated JPEG image.

Yet it remains very hard to find films where the technology isn't instantly cringe-inducing, even to laymen. So I asked PCMag staffers which films from the last 50+ years got technology right enough to look prescient, or just didn't completely mess it up.

Below are 10 that jumped out, minus any historical reenactments since they have the benefit of hindsight (sorry, Apollo 13). Let us know in the comments if we missed any of your favorites.

This article originally appeared on PCMag.com.

2001: A Space Odyssey (1968)

The list of things that Stanley Kubrick and Arthur C. Clarke got right in 2001—a year before we even landed on the moon—is long and dazzling. Entire books have been written about it. They had the essentials of laptops and cell phones, near perfect looks at life in space, and perhaps closest to home, the first digital voice assistant. HAL 9000 went homicidal in a way we haven't seen from Alexa or Siri...yet.

Logan's Run (1976)

Young people in togas literally flying around a disco ball probably isn't prescient tech (if you disagree, we want an invite to the raves you're attending). However, there are one or two things to watch for in this classic 1970s sci-fi action flick. As our senior analyst Sascha Segan said, the film "invented Tinder, my favorite random pop culture tech prediction ever." The clip above proves it. Also, there are some pretty sweet-looking monorails in the cityscape that are a nice mix of what you get at Disney and the potential of a future Hyperloop.

WarGames (1983)

This movie is 35 years old, but its premise is as terrifying now as it was then: what if a hacker "accidentally" set off a thermonuclear war? Matthew Broderick is a precocious teen who thinks he's hacking a game developer's database for early access to new titles, but he's actually breaching US military systems. Oops.

Check out what Broderick's character had in his room: an original IMSAI 8080 PC kit with a "massive" 17-inch black-and-white monitor. It talked to other computers over a 1200-baud modem, using an acoustic coupler to connect via an actual desktop phone, since there was no way to plug into it. That was just the stuff to fake the look of a high-tech kid's bedroom in 1983; the graphics for NORAD were all faked using a classic HP 9845C, typically used for science and engineering work, plus an Apple II. (h/t ITWorld for the deets.)

Sneakers (1992)

Sneakers debuted as the digital revolution was ramping up, and the movie embraced it all, from phone phreaks to white hat hackers. Even the initial marketing campaign for the film included a floppy disc with some encrypted data on it. A consultant on the film was a professor who helped create RSA encryption, and the film's code-breaking MacGuffin reads like modern-day cryptography, personifying exactly what the NSA wants: a key to break into everything. It could happen.

The Truman Show (1998)

Screenwriter Andrew Niccol wrote dystopic flicks like Gattaca, In Time, and Simone (aka S1MONE), which featured actors getting replaced by CGI. But few hold a candle to his 1998 hit The Truman Show. It follows the life of a man (Jim Carrey) who doesn't realize his life is a reality show broadcast to millions of rapt viewers.

It debuted just as reality TV shows like Survivor and Big Brother were about to hit it big. But 20 years later, with the world now under constant surveillance via our phone cameras, CCTV, and drones in the sky, is it any wonder there's an entire syndrome called The Truman Show Delusion, in which people think they're being watched by an audience at all times?

Office Space (1999)

Mike Judge, the same guy who brought us the hyper-realistic TV show Silicon Valley, made this film about bored office workers preparing for Y2K almost 20 years ago. The scene above, featuring the hated office printer, may in fact be the most cathartic in the history of techno-cinema.

Minority Report (2002)

Based on a Philip K. Dick short story, this Steven Spielberg film is about cops using people with precognitive abilities to stop crimes before they happen. We're a few years from that, but algorithms as good as someone with ESP are in development, and law enforcement sees the film as a blueprint, not a cautionary tale.

Some of the tech in this film already exists, like the gesture-based "spatial operating system" used by Tom Cruise, even if it didn't exactly take the world by storm (think Xbox 360 Kinect). The movie's science advisor showed off something similar in a TED talk. The film also has lots of autonomous cars. But perhaps the most prescient thing of all in the film was how it depicted personalized advertising and product placement, a future in which we are most certainly entrenched.

Robot and Frank (2012)

This little indy film from 2012 takes place some undisclosed amount of time in the future, but probably is right about...now. You can see that in the designs they had for not only the phones and tablets, but also in the robot itself, which is based a bit on the Honda ASIMO design for a caretaker robot. Fun fact: the robot in the film, voiced by Peter Sarsgaard, was designed by the same company that makes helmets for Daft Punk.

The Social Network (2010)

Perhaps this breaks the "no historical reenactments" rule, but few would probably say this look into the founding of Facebook was to-the-letter accurate (except for the deposition scenes). But what a look it is. As writer Aaron Sorkin put it, this isn't really a story about an invention, it's about "the themes of friendship, loyalty, jealousy, class, and power." This film made it to just about every best-of list that year. All that from 2010, six years after Facebook's debut. If there was a sequel today, imagine watching Jesse Eisenberg testifying before Congress.

Her (2013)

Spike Jonze's Her is a quiet romantic drama that's all about one major relationship: Theodore Twombly (played to awkward perfection by Joaquin Phoenix) and an artificially intelligent operating system named Samantha voiced by Scarlett Johansson (is it any wonder he'd fall in love?).

Up for five Oscars, including Best Picture, the film came about when digital voice assistants were just getting started (Siri arrived on iPhone 4s in 2011). Since then, they've only grown more prevalent, as Alexa, Cortana, and the Google Assistant joined the party.

Will they ever get to the point that Samantha does, when she (SPOILER) joins up with other smart AIs to upgrade themselves? Probably not, but authors (including Arthur C. Clarke ) have long been waiting for networked systems to develop a consciousness—before the internet even existed. And they don't think it'll be nice.

Thankfully, in Her, the evolved OSes all leave the planet for greener pastures. We can only wait and see. Until then, enjoy Her for not only the tech and futuristic interfaces, but also the love story about healing a broken man.

About Our Expert

Eric Griffith

Senior Editor, Features

My Experience

I've been writing about computers, the internet, and technology professionally since 1992, more than half of that time with PCMag. I arrived at the end of the print era of PC Magazine as a senior writer. I served for a time as managing editor of business coverage before settling back into the features team for the last decade and a half. I write features on all tech topics, plus I handle several special projects, including the Readers' Choice and Business Choice surveys and yearly coverage of the Best ISPs and Best Gaming ISPs, Best Products of the Year, and Best Brands (plus the Best Brands for Tech Support, Longevity, and Reliability).

I started in tech publishing right out of college, writing and editing stories about hardware and development tools. I migrated to software and hardware coverage for families, and I spent several years exclusively writing about the then-burgeoning technology called Wi-Fi. I was on the founding staff of several magazines, including Windows Sources, FamilyPC, and Access Internet Magazine. All of which are now defunct, and it's not my fault. I have freelanced for publications as diverse as Sony Style, Playboy.com, and Flux. I got my degree at Ithaca College in, of all things, television/radio. But I minored in writing so I'd have a future.

In my long-lost free time, I wrote some novels, a couple of which are not just on my hard drive: BETA TEST ("an unusually lighthearted apocalyptic tale," according to Publishers' Weekly) and a YA book called KALI: THE GHOSTING OF SEPULCHER BAY. Go get them on Kindle.

I work from my home in Ithaca, NY, and did it long before pandemics made it cool.

The Technology I Use

My first computer was a Laser 128, an Apple II-compatible clone with an integrated keyboard, matched with an eye-straining monochrome green monitor. I used it to type papers in college for other people for money...until I discovered the Mac SE in the college computer room. That changed my life. My first cellphone was a Samsung Uproar—the silver one with the built-in MP3 player from the Napster days (the pre-iPod era).

I use an iPhone 15 Pro hourly and an iPad Air infrequently (but I'm always in the market for a cheap Android tablet). I have a PlayStation 5 just to play Spider-Man, and several Windows machines, including a work-issued Lenovo ThinkPad. I talk to Alexa and Siri all day long. I do the majority of my computing on a 15-inch LG Gram laptop attached to a Thunderbolt hub to run a multi-monitor setup—I overdid it on the power needed to simply work from home.

I'm most at home in Microsoft Word after decades of writing there. More and more, I turn to services like Google Docs, using tools like Grammarly. I use Google's Chrome browser due to an addiction to several extensions I think I can't live without, but probably could. I use Excel extensively on data-intensive stories, but for chart creation, we've switched over entirely to using Infogram for interactive features that are hard to find elsewhere. I do a lot of graphics work for my stories, but limit myself to the free and amazing Paint.NET software to edit images.

I'm a firm evangelist for using the cloud for backup and syncing of files; I'm primarily using Dropbox, which has never failed me, but I also have redundant setups on Microsoft OneDrive, plus extra picture backups on Amazon Photos and iCloud. Why take chances? For entertainment, mine is a streaming-only household—my kid has never seen network TV and barely been exposed to commercials, thanks to Roku and Amazon Music. The house is peppered with smart speakers from Amazon for instant gratification and control of smart home devices like multiple Wyze cameras and Nest Protect smoke detectors. I've got accounts on all the major social networks, to my horror. I have a robot vacuum for each floor of the house. I want a 3D printer, but not sure what I'd use it for.

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