How Apple Killed Cinema

I feel like it has gotten to the point where nearly everyone has at least one Apple product. Whether it is an iPhone, iPad, or iPod touch, most of the people I interact with in my day to day life use an iSomething. I cannot go an hour without seeing one at school, and that is just one isolated area. The point I’m getting at is that Apple products are everywhere.

They have even expanded beyond the real world; now, more often than not, the phone of choice in any film is the iPhone. Be it a short film made by a student, or a full Hollywood production, 9 times out of ten, the main character uses an iPhone or other Apple product to make a call or pull up information.

What happened to this?

The problem for me is that creativity has ceased. After all, why create fancy new technology and next generation props when the future is already here and the technology is readily available.

A few years back, spy films and other action-type films would have had extremely-inventive gadgets that made me yearn for the future and the day that I would be able to use holograms. Fast forward to today and the only thing you see in movies are iPads and iPhones.

Sure they have upgraded user interfaces that make them look fancy and often have attachments that can, for example, hack a vault code, but it is nothing exciting anymore. I watched the latest Mission Impossible last night and he even gets his mission assignments via iPhone. Fortunately, the messaged did not self destruct.

In just the one film, all of these Apple products are used to:

• Locks Open: Throughout the film Ethan Hunt and Benji Dunn used an iPhone 4 to violate the locks and open doors.
• Hack from a MacBook Air: Not only is the thinnest and lightest laptop on the planet but also a powerful computer for hacking.
• Scan Faces: The latest in spy technology are computerized contact lenses that relay the info to the iPhone for facial recognition in a crowd.
• Work with other futuristic gadgets: in a scene from the film, the agent connects an iPad to a projector and a screen to create a distorted reality field. In other words, the iPad takes care of all the calculations while a camera tracks the movement of the eyes of a security guard. Thus, a realistic image is projected.

Scene from Mission Impossible Ghost Protocol

Movies have always been a way for viewers to escape. They can pretend that they are someone they are not; they can become engrossed in a fantastic story filled with things one could only dream of. But when I see an Apple product, I just think, “oh I have that, no big deal.”

I don’t know if it is a part of an effort to make the movie more relate-able, or they just think that the iPhone is the the most advanced devices available, but honestly I am getting tired of seeing the same thing over and over. It is not like there are not other devices available; it seems like the iPhone is the golden standard in cinema.

Have you noticed how much iPhones are used? Has product placement gone too far? Let me know in the comments below