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Tuesday, August 25, 2026
Aliens at 40: from wearable cameras to exoskeletons, here are the technologies the film predicted
theconversation.com: Director James Cameron’s acclaimed sci-fi movie Aliens turns 40 in August. It’s a sequel to Ridley Scott’s claustrophobic breakout hit Alien, made in 1979. Where the original featured one terrifying creature, Cameron’s movie features hundreds – and pits them against a squad of space marines.
Alien (and the many sequels of varying quality) is unfortunately a huge cultural blind spot for me. I'm a huge fan of practical effects/props, especially when it comes to science fiction -- there really is nothing cooler than a huge, clunky, datapad or a big ol' mech suit. I enjoyed reading this article because it let me ogle at cool stuff, in so many words, which is always a good time. However, not to try try to metagame too hard, but I've always found commentary like this a little perplexing. "Snow Crash", "The Simpsons", "Contagion", people have been doing this whole "this piece of media PREDICTED THE FUTURE?!??" song and dance forever, and while it's mostly harmless, I can't help but feel like it's missing the point? Creators make artistic choices because they are trying to make an argument or paint a picture of a world, and to wipe over that potentially biting social commentary with facile gaping at cool nerd shit feels kind of sad. This article is far from the worst I've ever seen (it is engaging with the themes of the film), but it's just an unfortunate part of a broader media commentary tradition that I'm not crazy for.
I think a common theme in many films that look far into the future is that they dream and imagine bigger than when we in said future have reached. Like "Alien" and "Aliens" with its futuristic ideas of what the modern world is supposed to look like "Back to the Future" also had various ideas of what new inventions would appear. In both these cases these crazy mecha suits, robots, or flying cars in reality aren't a thing. Or created with the purposes that theses past movies films predicted they would be used for. We've taken it a step further with some inventions like inventions similar to mecha suits that help people with disabilities or in older age, not the same intended and much less advanced but it places a better in bettering society. Robots are very much a hot topic in our current world and there is an extreme fascination and fear of them. What there capable of and how many jobs they continue to take over has really put a strain on the job market and impact so many peoples lives to a dangerous degree. Most of the word actually finds there presence unwelcoming due to the threat of their livelihood.
It’s definitely been an interesting thought exercise that has come up in a couple of classes I have taken to think about what technology in the future might look like. Really, I think it’s kind of just impossible to make predictions about future technology like that, because it is so hard to predict what we will or will not discover. I also think that it might be especially difficult for me to make predictions about general worldwide technology, because I am not very in the loop about computer developments. I think I would be able to make a more realistic guess about what future theater/entertainment technology would look like since I am a lot more engaged in that world than computers and space travel. A piece of this article that really stuck out to me was the mention of the tracking technology in Aliens, and the author’s guess about “smart camera” tracking systems that could theoretically exist in 2179 in order to track alien and human behaviour. As I am sure we have all been hearing a lot about surveillance cameras as of late, I thought this seemed a lot more scarily realistic than many other things in the article.
3 comments:
Alien (and the many sequels of varying quality) is unfortunately a huge cultural blind spot for me. I'm a huge fan of practical effects/props, especially when it comes to science fiction -- there really is nothing cooler than a huge, clunky, datapad or a big ol' mech suit. I enjoyed reading this article because it let me ogle at cool stuff, in so many words, which is always a good time. However, not to try try to metagame too hard, but I've always found commentary like this a little perplexing. "Snow Crash", "The Simpsons", "Contagion", people have been doing this whole "this piece of media PREDICTED THE FUTURE?!??" song and dance forever, and while it's mostly harmless, I can't help but feel like it's missing the point? Creators make artistic choices because they are trying to make an argument or paint a picture of a world, and to wipe over that potentially biting social commentary with facile gaping at cool nerd shit feels kind of sad. This article is far from the worst I've ever seen (it is engaging with the themes of the film), but it's just an unfortunate part of a broader media commentary tradition that I'm not crazy for.
I think a common theme in many films that look far into the future is that they dream and imagine bigger than when we in said future have reached. Like "Alien" and "Aliens" with its futuristic ideas of what the modern world is supposed to look like "Back to the Future" also had various ideas of what new inventions would appear. In both these cases these crazy mecha suits, robots, or flying cars in reality aren't a thing. Or created with the purposes that theses past movies films predicted they would be used for. We've taken it a step further with some inventions like inventions similar to mecha suits that help people with disabilities or in older age, not the same intended and much less advanced but it places a better in bettering society. Robots are very much a hot topic in our current world and there is an extreme fascination and fear of them. What there capable of and how many jobs they continue to take over has really put a strain on the job market and impact so many peoples lives to a dangerous degree. Most of the word actually finds there presence unwelcoming due to the threat of their livelihood.
It’s definitely been an interesting thought exercise that has come up in a couple of classes I have taken to think about what technology in the future might look like. Really, I think it’s kind of just impossible to make predictions about future technology like that, because it is so hard to predict what we will or will not discover. I also think that it might be especially difficult for me to make predictions about general worldwide technology, because I am not very in the loop about computer developments. I think I would be able to make a more realistic guess about what future theater/entertainment technology would look like since I am a lot more engaged in that world than computers and space travel. A piece of this article that really stuck out to me was the mention of the tracking technology in Aliens, and the author’s guess about “smart camera” tracking systems that could theoretically exist in 2179 in order to track alien and human behaviour. As I am sure we have all been hearing a lot about surveillance cameras as of late, I thought this seemed a lot more scarily realistic than many other things in the article.
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