Interfaces

Maybe it's just because I work in software, but I often get distracted during movies by things like GUIs and user interfaces, particularly in near future sci-fi.  Sometimes it's something obvious and radical, commented upon by many like the user interface from Minority Report.  Other times it's barely an aside, as in the GUIs used by the cops in Tokyo Gore Police.  In some ways this is annoying, since something like the Minority Report interface is intended to be flashy rather than utilitarian, and in the case of Tokyo Gore Police is merely a facade to show you that they're accessing "a computer".

However, at the same time, having multiple instances of computer interfaces - in a variety of environments - helps to focus the mind on the various aspects of interface outside of what is normally encountered in real life.
At the time of Minority Report, the gesture based interface wasn't something I had seen before, and hence introduced me to a new means of interacting with the computer.  With Tokyo Gore Police, the interface itself was quite basic (and I'm not even referring to the three lines of pseudocode/logging that repeated on a projector in the background) but it's the presentation of information in a japanese environment that was exceptional to me here in Australia.

Film, as a visual medium, is well suited to showing us how things can be portrayed.  With sci-fi, it really brings to the fore the interaction between humans and technology.  Although plot and pacing can mean that flashy wins over functional, it nevertheless allows us an opportunity to consider why an interface could be detrimental and what benefits it adds, if any, over our current interfaces by exposing us to a wider range of environments without the requirement that it be functional.