Four Classic Movie Plots That Would be Sunk by Today’s Tech

It’s often said that it’s getting harder and harder for screenwriters to break through today. It’s not that everyone has at least one screenplay in them – they don’t, by the way – it’s that modern tech is conspiring to make watertight plots much, much harder to devise.

After all, in the old days, we were all that little bit more disconnected than we are today, so lines of communication simply weren’t there for people. This meant that misunderstandings could occur, information would be hard to track down and the glaringly obvious would always be possible to be obscured.

So what concrete examples can we give to illustrate the point? The answer is plenty and – spoiler alert – we’ll be giving away some key plot points here.

The 39 Steps

Let’s go all the way back to 1935 first and The 39 Steps. It’s one of Alfred Hitchcock’s earliest films and is loosely based on the John Buchan novel of the same name. The hero Richard Hannay unwittingly becomes embroiled in a spy drama in which the central mystery is what exactly these 39 Steps are. The action takes him on the run as he is wrongly accused of murder and it is only when he realises that the phrase refers to military secrets that an unknown military power wants to obtain that the mystery is solved.

Fast forward to today and all our hero would need to do is check out one of the many websites that aim to share conspiracy theories and other underhand activity and Hannay could have saved himself a whole lot of bother.

North by Northwest

Let’s turn to Hitchcock again for a similar plotline and another movie that just wouldn’t make sense today. In North by Northwest, Cary Grant plays a Mad Men-style ad man whose three-Martini client lunch ends up with him being kidnapped in a case of mistaken identity. After countless action sequences including the most famous of all when he is pursued through a wheatfield by a deadly crop-spraying plane, the movie’s famous climax takes place on Mount Rushmore under the gaze of the presidents carved into the rock face.

But if he’d been able to produce a mobile phone and even had a tracking app on it he could either have identified himself to his kidnappers or have been found far more easily
.
Rounders

On a more contemporary note, before Matt Damon started to appear in period dramas like The Great Wall he started to make his name in movies like Rounders. In this particular film he played a would-be poker pro who was involved in a number of high stakes games against a terrifying opponent called Teddy KGB. In the same position today, Damon could probably opt for playing in a live casino online instead where he’d have a chance to play many different variations of the game and never once have to come face to face with an opponent int the flesh.

Phone Booth
And, for our fourth film, there’s the 2002 Colin Farrell movie Phone Booth in which he finds himself pinned down by a sniper in the eponymous booth. Now, I don’t know about you, but I haven’t seen one of those on the street for years! It just wouldn’t be the same if he got a call on his mobile and could … move away or duck. 

Tech has done a lot for us but it’s also made our fiction just that little harder to write. Maybe that’s the curse we had to accept for progression.