The 2025 Oscar season is upon us and movies continue to reflect many possible futures

Professor Michael Milford, QUT Centre for Robotics

Movies combine the wildest imaginations of directors and script writers with themes that reflect our current and possible future realities. Depictions of technologies and engineering concepts in movies range from the ridiculous (but often entertaining) to accurate. But, seen by billions around the world, they can be one of the most impactful mechanisms for introducing, exciting and occasionally terrifying audiences around current and possible future technological developments.

So, with a world that is dominated by considerations around artificial intelligence and closer to the prospect of ubiquitous robots in our everyday lives than at any point in history, what are some of the key technological themes being depicted in movies, and how close to reality are they?

Obligatory spoiler warning… some plot points are revealed in the discussions.

Only a decade or two ago, drones were a rarity. Now, you can pick up a beginner drone for a few dollars that you can start flying in minutes. A thousand dollars will get you a highly capable platform with automated flying and obstacle avoidance abilities and the ability to maintain station even in fairly strong winds.

The massive advances in drone capabilities have resulted in their widespread deployment in the consumer market, in applications like real estate, surveillance, and military contexts. Movies have been quick to catch on, with depictions that might have seemed fanciful only a few years ago becoming much closer to reality.

In 2019’s Spider-Man: Far From Home, drone fleets are able to project holograms to simulate a giant elemental monster attack. The reality isn’t quite there yet – drones are still constrained by payload and energy durations, and the proposed holographic technology isn’t as capable as shown in the movie.

Nevertheless, entertainment displays have reached the stage where many thousands of drones co-ordinate to put on incredible light shows, creating fantastical creatures and city skylines in the night sky. Drones are in widespread deployment doing blood deliveries in locations like Africa, although their deployment in urban environments is more limited, and they’re used in the environmental monitoring of remote regions like Antarctica and even shark patrols off Australian beaches.

A common theme in science fiction has been apocalyptic events. In today’s world, one of the interesting aspects of this consideration is what happens to all the automation present in our lives. While some automation is dependent on people maintaining the machinery and power systems underlying it, much automation, especially what’s powered by long-life batteries or solar power, could plausibly continue long after humans are gone.

In 2023’s Leave the World Behind, the main characters stumble across a stretch of road where autonomous Tesla vehicles, sans passengers, appear at high speed and crash into an ever growing graveyard of trashed cars. What could cause such a behaviour? Perhaps an automatic “return to base” instruction sent out to all cars, and a temporary suppression of the collision avoidance behaviours that should avoid such a pile up? While the depicted behaviour is an unintentional byproduct of the movie’s technological apocalyptic setting, it also reminds us of concerns around the potential misuse of these systems by bad actors like hackers.

Dune 2 is one of the movies in possible consideration for the upcoming Academy Awards, and is full of futuristic depictions of scientific and engineering concepts. In the harsh and arid world that is Arrakis, characters wear a full body suit called a stillsuit, that absorbs sweat and urine and other excretions from the body, and recycle them to create drinking water.

One of the challenges in creating such a technology revolves around heat (especially in such a hot environment) – humans cool down by sweating, and that sweat evaporating. Intercepting sweat ideally would occur after that evaporative cooling process had already occurred: alternatively, some sort of cooling mechanism could be used, which in turn would likely need an energy source.

Maximizing the usage of water has long been a priority for space exploration technology, where getting supplies like water to orbit and beyond is very expensive. Organizations like NASA have developed highly efficient water recovery and recycling mechanisms that enable crews on long space missions to reuse almost all of the water they start the mission with. With an Australian-made rover going to the moon this decade, as a possible step towards eventually sustaining a human presence on the moon, such technologies will play a critical role.

Blockbuster movies are created to entertain, and depictions of technology and engineering concepts can vary in their accuracy. Ultimately though, any depiction, whether accurate or ridiculous, current or futuristic, generates much-needed discussion and debate. And a society that regularly discusses such topics is a society that is best equipped to grasp those opportunities and manage those challenges.

For these and more reviews of engineering concepts in the movies, see our video collaborations with Engineers Australia’s Create.

2025 marks the 97^th Academy Awards. Professor Michael Milford will present at a free QUT Bold event called The Infinite Awe of Robotics on 27 March 2025, in partnership with the World Science Festival.