5 Movies with Awesome UI Besides Minority Report
There’s a lot of cookie-cutter UI design being done in movies these days, so I wanted to highlight some cool work that you may have missed.
- Moon, the first feature film by Duncan Jones (son of David Bowie), is about a solitary man tending an automated mineral extraction base on the moon. Being by himself, his interaction with the AI and robots on base is all he has, and their UI gives the movie it’s feel. Especially GERTY, a friendly, emoji-faced version of HAL 9000, whose best scene would reveal too much to show here, but is featured heavily in the trailer. This movie is incredible, and you should watch it yesterday.
2. Oblivion, a great Tom Cruise movie that not many people saw, for some reason. Apart from the simultaneously bumping and atmospheric soundtrack from M83, this movie is defined by the UX and design elements of the environment. Tom Cruise is part of a team cleaning up an almost-vacant Earth after some unspecified natural disaster. His partner feeds him information via her beautiful and sleek touchscreen desk:
The coolest thing though, is probably the bubble ship that Tom Cruise flies around on his surveys of the desolation, and it’s HUD.
3. Iron Man. There’s a lot going on here — explosions, Robert Downey Jr’s goatee, robot fights, etc. But if you don’t get distracted, there’s some really great UI design involved in Tony Stark’s basement workshop as well as the actual Iron Man suit. Personally, being a mechanical engineer as well as a designer, watching RDJ build the suit with the 3D projected AR interface was almost the best part of the movie.
4. Pacific Rim. For anyone who loves giant fighting robots, so hopefully everyone, Pacific Rim was an extremely welcome addition from Guillermo del Toro to the canon. A dimensional rift has opened up at the bottom of the Pacific Ocean, letting monsters of incomprehensible scale and violence loose into our world to wreak devastation. The only solution? 50 story fighting robots, obviously. But the neural stress of piloting such a complicated system is too much for one human brain, so the UI has to fuse 2 human consciousnesses together to make it work, while you and your co-pilot act out what your robot is doing using giant direct mechanical control.
Awwwww yeahhhh.
5. Tron:Legacy. In terms of story and acting, this entry made some missteps, but it might have the best UI aesthetic and feel of any of them, leading to a worthwhile viewing experience. Taking place in a world built of computational concepts, translating the feel of ultra-futuristic technology UI into every single element is what gives this movie it’s unique atmosphere. The killer soundtrack from Daft Punk doesn’t hurt, either. I could pick almost any random 30 second clip to show you, so here’s a couple of my favorites:
The scoreboard during the weird ring-throwing sport scene:
And the cockpit of the hover cars:
I hope this gives you some go-to reference material besides Minority Report next time the topic comes up.
