The techno-thriller goes old-school

Greyhound, Ford v Ferrari, and why we're so terrified by old technology

Tom Hanks.

No one expected the future to be quite this ... well, boring. We were promised jet-packs and space elevators, bionic eyes and walkie-talkies implanted in our wrists. Instead we got the mundane convenience of cell phones, drone warfare, search engines, and Uber Eats. The 21st century is not turning out to be nearly as exciting as the movies had led us to believe.

What is exhilarating, though, is to relive what life was like before our fandangled present. A new crop of technothrillers are doing just that: mining old technologies for adrenaline rushes, rather than imagining future ones. The World War II battleship drama Greyhound, out today on Apple TV+, is just the latest example of a script that finds the sort of thrills in a near-past that were previously found in the near-future, confirming that it is the absence of technology that now scares us the most — not what it might evolve into.

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Jeva Lange

Jeva Lange was the executive editor at TheWeek.com. She formerly served as The Week's deputy editor and culture critic. She is also a contributor to Screen Slate, and her writing has appeared in The New York Daily News, The Awl, Vice, and Gothamist, among other publications. Jeva lives in New York City. Follow her on Twitter.