2. Image Enhancing - Enemy of the State (And Many More)
One of the lamest movie tropes is the incredulous ability for computer-savvy characters to take the grainiest image of something or someone and enhance it to the point that it resembles an HD screen-grab of a Blu-ray movie hot out of stores. Blade Runner is perhaps the most famously-spoofed example of this, but given that the film is set in a very different future, it's just a little too easy to pick apart. My personal favourite has to be Enemy of the State, a brilliantly paranoic thriller that suggests the government has a far more advanced array of surveillence technology than we can possibly be aware of, a statement that, in light of recent events in the news, might not be too off the mark. However, Tony Scott took this to entertainingly ridiculous ends in the film, where he posits that the NSA are able to take stills from surveillance footage, and use a sophisticated computer program to "hypothesize" an unseen angle on an object - in this instance a shopping bag - from the other perspective. It's total babble, but the film does a bang-up job of making it seem plausible in the moment, largely because it plays Jon Voight's determination against Jack Black's skepticism that, really, the technology could fail them.