Best Technology Movies
Ranked by how strongly each film carries the visual signature of technology cinema — measured across 1,455 indexed frames from 18 films, against a 408,752-frame catalogue baseline. Not by box office, and not by vote.
Technology films over-index on skyscraper, helmet and neon sign — the objects that make the genre recognisable before a line is spoken.
- 1
Brazil (1985)
Terry GilliamDP Roger PrattIMDb 7.8TMDB 7.7See in full on FrameThrower →
Sam Lowry (Jonathan Pryce) is a harried technocrat in a futuristic society that is needlessly convoluted and inefficient. He dreams of a life where he can fly away from technology and overpowering bureaucracy, and spend eternity with the woman of his dreams. While trying to rectify the wrongful arrest of one Harry Buttle (Brian Miller), Lowry meets the woman he is always chasing in his dreams, Jill Layton (Kim Greist). Meanwhile, the bureaucracy has fingered him responsible for a rash of terrorist bombings, and Sam and Jill's lives are put in danger.
- 2
Upgrade (2018)
Leigh WhannellDP Stefan DuscioIMDb 7.5TMDB 7.5See in full on FrameThrower →
Grey's a stay-at-home mechanic, whose wife is Asha. One day, Grey asks Asha to help him return a car to his client. Whilst Grey and Asha's self-driving car malfunctions, it crashes. Grey watches helplessly as Asha bleeds to death next to him. Grey returns home - a widowed quadriplegic, under the care of his mother. His wife's death and the inability of police to identify their attackers cause him to sink into a depression. After a suicide attempt, he's offered to have high tech chip implanted - enabling him to walk. Though initially hesitant, he's persuaded to have the surgery.
- 3
Koyaanasquatsi (1982)
Godfrey ReggioDP Ron FrickeIMDb 8.2TMDB 7.9See in full on FrameThrower →
This experimental film looks at the world and more specifically the effect man has had on the landscape and the environment. Without narration, the film shows the world in a pristine condition and untouched: blue skies, beautiful landscapes and endless vistas. The man-made world is much less appealing. Essentially a montage using a variety of film techniques to provide a visually stunning montage of images.
- 4
Iron Man 2 (2010)
Jon FavreauDP Matthew LibatiqueIMDb 6.9TMDB 6.8See in full on FrameThrower →
Robert Downey Jr.as Tony Stark
Gwyneth Paltrowas Pepper Potts
Don Cheadleas Lt. Col. James 'Rhodey' Rhodes
With the world now aware of his dual life as the armored superhero Iron Man, billionaire inventor Tony Stark faces pressure from the government, the press, and the public to share his technology with the military. Unwilling to let go of his invention, Stark, along with Pepper Potts, and James "Rhodey" Rhodes at his side, must forge new alliances - and confront powerful enemies.
- 5
Blackhat (2015)
Michael MannDP Stuart DryburghIMDb 5.5TMDB 5.5See in full on FrameThrower →
Nick Hathaway, an extremely talented hacker who has gone astray, finds his way out of a 15 year prison sentence when parts of a computer code he once wrote during his youth appears in a malware that triggered a terrorist attack in a nuclear power plant in China. This opportunity will reunite him with an old friend but will also put him in the middle of a power game between the American and Chinese government as well as an arch villain hacker whose identity he has to find if he wants to keep his freedom and his life.
- 6
The Conversation (1974)
Francis Ford CoppolaDP Bill ButlerIMDb 7.7TMDB 7.5See in full on FrameThrower →
Harry Caul is a devout Catholic and a lover of jazz music who plays his saxophone while listening to his jazz records. He is a San Francisco-based electronic surveillance expert who owns and operates his own small surveillance business. He is renowned within the profession as being the best, one who designs and constructs his own surveillance equipment. He is an intensely private and solitary man in both his personal and professional life, which especially irks Stan, his business associate who often feels shut out of what is happening with their work. This privacy, which includes not letting anyone into his apartment and always telephoning his clients from pay phones is, in part, intended to control what happens around him. His and Stan's latest job (a difficult one) is to record the private discussion of a young couple meeting in crowded and noisy Union Square. The arrangement with his client, known only to him as "the director", is to provide the audio recording of the discussion and photographs of the couple directly to him alone in return for payment. Based on circumstances with the director's assistant, Martin Stett, and what Harry ultimately hears on the recording, Harry believes that the lives of the young couple are in jeopardy. Harry used to be detached from what he recorded, but is now concerned ever since the deaths of three people that were the direct result of a previous audio recording he made for another job. Harry not only has to decide if he will turn the recording over to the director, but also if he will try and save the couple's lives using information from the recording. As Harry goes on a quest to find out what exactly is happening on this case, he finds himself in the middle of his worst nightmare.
- 7
Nerve (2016)
Ariel Schulman, Henry JoostDP Michael SimmondsIMDb 6.5TMDB 7.0See in full on FrameThrower →
Industrious high school senior Vee Delmonico has had it with living life on the sidelines. When pressured by friends to join the popular online game Nerve, Vee decides to sign up for just one dare in what seems like harmless fun. But as she finds herself caught up in the thrill of the adrenaline-fueled competition partnered with a mysterious stranger, the game begins to take a sinister turn with increasingly dangerous acts, leading her into a high stakes finale that will determine her entire future.
- 8
Ex Machina (2015)
Alex GarlandDP Rob HardyIMDb 7.7TMDB 7.6See in full on FrameThrower →
Caleb, a 26 year old programmer at the world's largest internet company, wins a competition to spend a week at a private mountain retreat belonging to Nathan, the reclusive CEO of the company. But when Caleb arrives at the remote location he finds that he will have to participate in a strange and fascinating experiment in which he must interact with the world's first true artificial intelligence, housed in the body of a beautiful robot girl.
- 9
Mute (2018)
Duncan JonesDP Gary ShawIMDb 5.5TMDB 5.6See in full on FrameThrower →
Berlin. Forty years from today. A roiling city of immigrants, where East crashes against West in a science-fiction Casablanca. Leo Beiler (Skarsgard), a mute bartender has one reason and one reason only for living here, and she's disappeared. But when Leo's search takes him deeper into the city's underbelly, an odd pair of American surgeons (led by Rudd) seem to be the only recurring clue, and Leo can't tell if they can help, or who he should fear most.
- 10
2001: A Space Odyssey (1968)
Stanley KubrickDP Geoffrey UnsworthIMDb 8.3TMDB 8.1See in full on FrameThrower →
"2001" is a story of evolution. Sometime in the distant past, someone or something nudged evolution by placing a monolith on Earth (presumably elsewhere throughout the universe as well). Evolution then enabled humankind to reach the moon's surface, where yet another monolith is found, one that signals the monolith placers that humankind has evolved that far. Now a race begins between computers (HAL) and human (Bowman) to reach the monolith placers. The winner will achieve the next step in evolution, whatever that may be.
What technology films are made of
How much more often each element appears in a technology frame than in an average frame from the catalogue. A ratio, not a share — skyscraper is not in most frames, it is simply far more common here than anywhere else.
- skyscraper4.9×
- helmet2.9×
- neon sign2.8×
- concrete wall2.4×
- trench coat1.9×
- foliage1.7×
- chair1.6×
How technology films are shot
Weaker signals than the objects above, and worth saying so: most dramatic genres skew dark and night-heavy, so these numbers separate technology from the catalogue far more than they separate it from its neighbours.
- 31%dayvs 42% baseline
- 52%nightvs 43% baseline
- 24%widevs 20% baseline
What breaks the pattern
Transcendence (2014) is the least typical film here — it carries the least of what the rest of this list is made of. Which is either a failure of the genre label, or the most interesting film on the page.
Method
Every frame in the FrameThrower catalogue is tagged for shot size, lighting, time of day, camera angle, colour and the objects visible in it. This page aggregates those tags across 1,455 frames from 18 films carrying the technology label, and compares each figure to the same measurement across the whole catalogue (408,752 frames). Films are ranked by how closely they match the theme’s over-indexed elements, weighted by how distinctive each element is; one film per series. Only films with at least 20 indexed frames and 500 TMDB votes are listed.
Machine-readable: /api/list/technology
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