Why James Cameron’s Aliens is the best movie about technology — medium.com

My friend Patrick has a joke. Maybe you’ve heard it. It’s a great line, not least because it’s probably true. It also illustrates an important principle: most movies (and books, and maybe even companies) that make a big deal about how much they’re about technology are rarely if ever the best at actually being about technology. In the case of movies, this is probably a good thing. If a movie with a lot of technology becomes a vehicle for lots of deep ideas about technology, there’s not much room for the human stories that you need to make a movie work. Steven Spielberg’s Minority Report (which being a dad with a heart, I like a lot) doesn’t have a lot to say about tech, other than that in a future where police officers literally have psychics, they also need really slick interfaces for managing endless amounts of paperwork. Spike Jonze’s Her (which being a thirtysomething tech writer, I loved) probably could have used as much time and thought spent on some of the more solipsistic ideas about divorce and gender as it put into the admittedly awesome video games. As for most movies about startups or media culture, you’re better off finding big ideas about them in a movie like Citizen Kane, which, spoilers, is absolutely as much about the weird interregnum of cheap mass newspapers and radio stations at the beginning of the century as it is about sleds and hubris.

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