Sci-Fi Movies That Have Aged Terribly

When it comes to aging, there's obviously a secret that Hollywood is keeping from the rest of us. Perhaps the denizens of Tinseltown spend all their time off-camera in stasis with vitamin drips. Whatever the secret, it's one that eludes one of our most treasured genres — science fiction. 

Dreaming up what's possible for the future is inherently fun to watch. As time moves forward, we catch up to imaginations of the past, and it can be laughable to see what we thought today would be like. Sure, some movies age gracefully and maintain their whimsical attributes. But other times, as the world moves forward, a sci-fi film can get left behind in time and not in an endearing, mummified state. Instead, it continues to decay and rot as our perceptions change. 

So what's up with these horribly dated science fiction films? In some instances, it's the future tech, while in others, everything about them is wrong. If you have a fond memory of some of these flicks, it's best to leave them as gems in your mind because these sci-fi movies have aged terribly.

In the 1990s, The Lawnmower Man took the new landscape of virtual reality and injected it with some horror, a la Stephen King. "Based" on the author's short story, the movie focuses on a man named Jobe who's subjected to VR experiments that grant him telepathic powers. However, the graphics here are laughable, and they don't even hold up as an endearing product of the time period, especially a cringe-worthy computer-animated sex scene. It gets even worse when Jobe uploads himself into a mainframe, resulting in Pierce Brosnan's scientist character needing to dive in and face the monster he created. It's amusing at first ... and then it's just hard to watch.

The premise that a man could obtain supernatural powers by experiencing VR is so ridiculous that even comic book nerds at the time were rolling their eyes. It doesn't help any that we have more technology in our pockets now than Brosnan's scientist had in his whole dingy basement. Worse still, the movie has nothing to do with King's short story, aside from the fact that there's a man who mows lawns. It contains so little relation to the original story that King sued the production company to have his name removed from the film's credits and promotional campaign altogether.

The only thing that saves The Core from being a complete bomb is the cast, which includes Hilary Swank, Aaron Eckhart, and Stanley Tucci. The movie centers around a group of scientists taking a journey to the center of the Earth to kickstart the core, which has stopped spinning, resulting in the disappearance of Earth's protective magnetosphere. Don't worry though, it will hang around for a year or so while they figure stuff out.

As the characters are standing in a sparkling geode hundreds of miles below the Earth's crust, you may be asking yourself, "How are those flimsy suits withstanding the pressure when their ship needs to be made out of a mythical element to do so?" The questions keep pouring in. When a hole in our magnetic field appears and melts the Golden Gate Bridge, it's hard not to notice that none of the cars are melting. And in order to "restart" the Earth's center, they must time out several nuclear bombs to begin swirling the magma around the core. It doesn't take a PhD to know that detonating several nukes at the center of our Earth probably isn't going to end well. It's all pretty and fun, but it will give any scientist a brain aneurysm.

John Hughes, nerds, and a young Robert Downey Jr. with a bra strapped to his head — what could possibly be wrong with Weird Science? There are so many outdated aspects of this 1985 film that it's not even laughable. The movie's frat boy vibe was really out of character for the director, and it makes the movie nearly unwatchable today. After all, the stars are two nerdy boys who create a magic sex doll in order to convince other girls of their sexual prowess ... which works by the way. They get the girls they lusted for, and the woman they created continues to help other boys in their school trick girls into liking them.

In addition to the whole Frankenstein she-bot problem, the film's portrayal of technology makes it hard to watch. At one climactic moment, an electrical surge shoots open washing machine doors and has dogs sitting on ceilings. Not to mention that we need to buy into the fact that the boys create a girl with their computer, some wires clamped onto a Barbie doll, and a single keystroke that hacks into a powerful, government computer mainframe that's guarded by a man who manually types "access denied" into his keyboard in response to any server queries.

We would argue that climate change skeptics who watched The Day After Tomorrow latched on to the sci-fi aspects of this 2004 destruction porno hard and still haven't let go. Even Dennis Quaid's gigantic smile can't stop us from rolling our eyes as the characters try to outrun a cold wind that freezes people in place. Given that we're currently trying to convince a room full of crypt keepers that we need to stop drilling holes in our planet, it can be frustrating to watch this film's portrayal of climate change.

In The Day After Tomorrow, a massive shift in the Earth's weather develops three superstorms across the Northern Hemisphere that funnel ice cold air through their cores and unleash tsunamis and tornadoes across the globe. The result is half the world being plunged into an ice age overnight. The film takes what could happen over the course of several years and condenses it into a few days of Hollywood heroism. It's mind-numbing in all the wrong ways.

When Terminator Salvation was announced, everyone was feverish with anticipation of more Terminators and also about Batman himself, Christian Bale, as John Connor! Not to mention that sexy trailer with the Nine Inch Nails song playing over a gritty futurescape, complete with giant machines snatching resistance fighters. 

However, the movie makes a choice that seems like a logical direction for The Terminator franchise ... at first. They step into the future and show humanity battling the machine hive mind. While that might seem cool, this choice muddies up a timeline that had already become murky after the franchise's third installment. Crazier still, they even shift the hero focus from John Connor himself — the very core of The Terminator series. 

After Terminator Salvation, screenwriters immediately negated most of the film's storyline developments. Added to the film's lack of foresight is the fact that this future was in the year 2018. There may not be young bionic Schwarzeneggers running around today, but with how the world is panning out these days, we'd say they didn't make the landscape chaotic enough.

The ability to sit in our living rooms with VR goggles has turned this '90s sci-fi thriller into a comedy. There's almost nothing accurate about Virtuosity's depiction of technology, from the 8-track cartridges that house each AI system to the alien cocoon that spawns Russell Crowe's demented VR simulation. Once the sadistic program, known as SID, is brought to life, he retains the abilities he had in the virtual world. He can regenerate by touching technology — or anything really — and his face distorts and morphs with his moods. There isn't a single part of Virtuosity that contains any technological accuracy. The only part you believe is that Russell Crowe is having way too much fun.

As far as visions of the future goes, it feels adolescent. When it was first released, most of us had fun watching two budding movie stars duke it out in dystopia, with Crowe up against Denzel Washington's detective. Now that we have over two decades of other Washington and Crowe movies to enjoy, there's little reason to subject ourselves to all of Virtuosity's inaccuracies. If you remember it being good, best to leave it your mind that way.

Keanu Reeves and science fiction? What could possibly be wrong with that? Well, everything (except, perhaps the cast). Johnny Mnemonic is about traffickers who transport data via implants in their brains when that data is too sensitive to transfer across "The Net". However, it's so far off on how technology works that we can't even excuse the fact that this bomb was made in the '90s. The movie treats the brain as though it's a computer hard drive, allowing for more space to be created if you just delete memories. It's clear that the writers had little to no knowledge of data capacity. Even if we pretended that the brain is a computer that can have files deleted and added, all of Johnny's accumulated childhood memories could fit into a thumb drive that you can buy at any decent gas station nowadays.

Then there's the whole "nerve attenuation syndrome" (NAS) angle. In the film, NAS is an affliction spreading through the population as a result of over-dependence on technology. Radio waves floating through the air are deteriorating people's nervous systems, but hey, what choice do people have? It's either death or no cat videos. Basically, the movie was playing into the fear that technology such as cell phones would give people cancer, and the only believable part of Johnny Mnemonic is that a cure has been found for NAS, but a pharmaceutical company sees treating symptoms as more profitable than releasing the cure.