The INQUIRER's Top 10 Technology Movies

IT'S HARD TO believe that any subject matter has provided Hollywood with as many clunkers as high-tech. Pretty well anytime a computer appears on the silver screen, it's time to laugh or pull the plug, such is the hopeless naivety and crass generalisation involved.

In the movies, technology is tons of over-engineered kit, sad saps operating as “hackers” and threats to national security shortly to be solved by a man with a diamond-hard jaw, £50 haircut and eyebrows that are never in the same place twice.

The news that there is a to be a film based on Tamagotchi digital pets probably won't help matters so it's as good a time as ever to jot down The INQUIRER's Top 10 Technology Movies.

10. You've Got Mail. This 1998 piece of fluff was one of the first to catch on that email was a pretty good way to communicate. A remake of a tediously slow Jimmy Stewart romantic comedy, You've Got Mail started off with minus 10 points in the bank by having Tom Hanks in a starring role. I can't recall much about it apart from Meg Ryan's sulky face and that it seemed like an advert for the then-dominant AOL. The ancient promo site is still on the web.

9. Tron. My younger brother had this bunch of crap on about 13 times a day on the Veitch family Beta-Max back in the early 1980s, blocking the way to viewings of Evil Dead, Mad Max and the three or four other titles available in the UK rental stores at that time. Despite this, I'm struggling to remember much apart from the fact that it had the usual brilliant-programmer-working-for-evil-corporation shtick and he somehow ends up in a virtual world. Thanks to Tron, I now owe £15,000 on late-return fees for Raiders of the Lost Ark. It had better be worth it when I get it shunted onto DVD.

8. Jurassic Park. Saw this at the cinema in 1993 though god only knows what I was thinking of at the time. Still worth catching for the wonderfully naff scenes involving the network genius and attempts to hack back in to the system. Cost of special effects: squillions. Cost of IT consulting: tuppence. The name of the computer genius, we see what you've done there with the punning surname, is Dennis Nedry.

7. 2001: A Space Odyssey. Back in the 1970s this huge canvass of sci-fi fancy was on everybody's favourite movie list, but then Bohemian Rhapsody was on everybody's favourite music list. It's still a good yarn if you have a big screen to hand and can stomach Richard Strauss's portentous music but I'm including it more to canvass opinion about the on-board all-seeing, all-dancing computer, HAL 9000. In a previous list, I offered the old chestnut that HAL's name was a play on IBM that uses the previous letter of each capital. Several readers pointed out that author Arthur C. Clarke denied this in interviews but I still think he was just being pixie-ish. Who's right?

6. The Net. Deeply annoying piece of old tat starring Sandra Bullock acting out her usual full gamut of emotions from A to B.

5. Fahrenheit 451. Brilliant, if uncharacteristic, Francois Truffaut filming of a Ray Bradbury novel about a 1984-like dystopia where books have been banned and independent thinking outlawed.

Bradbury later wrote, “I thought I was describing a world that might evolve in four or five decades. But only a few weeks ago, in Beverly Hills one night, a husband and wife passed me, walking their dog. I stood staring after them, absolutely stunned. The woman held in one hand a small cigarette-package-sized radio, its antenna quivering. From this sprang tiny copper wires which ended in a dainty cone plugged into her right ear. There she was, oblivious to man and dog, listening to far winds and whispers and soap-opera cries, sleep-walking, helped up and down curbs by a husband who might just as well not have been there.”

In a world populated by Ipods and mobile phones with humans attached, and where the only books being read are written by Stephen King, you could be forgiven for thinking you had landed in the middle of the movie. The title refers, of course, to the temperature at which paper burns and gave its name to a technology analyst firm, The 451 Group.

4. Pirates of Silicon Valley. The prospect of dramatising the early days of the PC industry with actors playing Steve Jobs and Bill Gates seemed risible but this 1999 movie was a surprising triumph. The dialogue would seem preposterous unless you were already familiar with the egomania of Silicon Valley. Top quote from ‘Steve Wozniak': "You know, Steve [Jobs] was never like you or me, he always saw things differently. Even when I was in Berkeley, I would see something and just see kilobytes or circuit boards while he'd see karma or the meaning of the universe."

3. Star Trek IV. The old Trekkies always had a wonderfully light touch with sci-fi whimsy, never better evidenced than when Scotty attempts to use the Apple Mac mouse as a speech interface. All together now: "Hello computer!"

2. AI; Lawnmower Man; War Games; Password Swordfish; Johnny Mnemonic. These have all blurred into one movie in my mind.

1. Tomb Raider. Culture effectively ended with this movie of the game. Journalists were offered the chance to interview ‘Lara' and many did so, dutifully but surely with heavy, aching heart. µ