Quiz Of The Week: Tech Goes To The Movies

As well as being major consumers of technology, films have always presented the future to us. In the week that Star Wars was sold to Disney, our quiz looks at some of the ways the world of technology is represented in the movies.

Robots were central to Fritz Lang’s Metropolis (1927), one of the earliest science fiction dystopias on celluloid, and since then information technology, both real and imagined, has regularly taken a starring role in the most (or least) popular movies of our time.

Reverse the polarity on the flux capacitors!

Spoilt for choice, we’ve tried to stick to appearances by actual IT industry characters or feasible technologies, within films that TechWeekEurope readers might be expected (or even encouraged) to watch. This means the quiz involves Michael Caine (twice) and Angelina Jolie (once). Despite long hard searching, we couldn’t unearth a question for fave actor Nicolas Cage.

A big omission is The Matrix (1999). However the only question we could think of was “How much energy would it take to maintain and nourish a comatose human race, and provide a virtual reality Matrix for them? Is this is likely to be more than the electrical energy harvested from their brains? Therefore, does that film make any sense at all?”

Also absent is the Star Wars franchise, even though we view the open port weakness of the Death Star as a classic zero day vulnerability.

Films that made it in, include The Dark Knight Rises, and of course Blade Runner and 2001: A Space Odyssey. 

We apologise in advance for the obscurity of some of the questions in what is probably one of our hardest quizzes. We know, many of you will be reduced to guesswork at some point.

In fact, as we trawled the web for answers, we found that our initial answers to at least two of these questions was completely wrong. So if you fail on those, you are in very good company.

For a couple of other answers we are indebted to the marvellous site Starring the Computer.   A compendium of appearances by obscure computers in obscure movies and TV programmes, this is now one of our favourite sites. Its carefully indexed pages reveal that the computer industry’s biggest star by a long way is the IBM AN/FSQ-7, the largest computer ever built and with film credits including Fantastic Voyage (1966) and Towering Inferno (1974). and we hope to eventually see all the movies in which the we are awled some obscure bywaysThere are questions here whose answers we only just uncovered and we have to admit that our research

. But look on it as an educational opportunity. And a reminder of some great tech films to watch…. and also some not-so-great ones.

Ready to take the quiz?

Rolling… and action! 

And if  you enjoy it, try some of our other quizzes!