Where have all the spy gadgets gone?

One of my most vivid memories of childhood is that moment. thunderball When James Bond goes outside, he puts on a real jetpack and flies away. Everyone except the Mandalorian and the Rocketeer appears to be flying around in a jetpack, which makes him look silly for doing that. It was easy to wear it and hover slowly, and my love for Bond movies suddenly became real, too.

Since then, I have watched many spy shows and movies.Indeed, I would appreciate something like slow horse and recruit, striving for a kind of realism, and I’ve been binge watching Tom Clancy’s Fellow Spy shows (mainly on Amazon Prime). But my heart ultimately belongs to a spy show full of weird gadgets. to the hero, and about 20 minutes before the end credits is the moment to perform all the odd functions that are likely to be useful. But such scenes and gadgets are no longer as common as they used to be. They seem to have disappeared and I’m trying to figure out why.

“I think what we expect from spy movies is cutting edge,” Dr. Alexis Albion, curator of special projects at the International Spy Museum, told me by phone. “We want to see something that’s a little ahead of its time, right? I want to make sure our intelligence agencies are ahead of the curve.”

What Albion means is that there’s a fine line between cool gadgets and silly gadgets. And once that line is crossed, spy movies start to feel more like generic action movies than spy movies. Our Spy His hero and his gadgets require familiarity. As an example of what not to do, she cites Pierce Brosnan’s paragliding device that Bond quickly builds and rides. Die Another Day.

Don’t worry, I tried my best to forget. So let’s remember together.

Bond builds a surfboard out of his torso and rides a tsunami, but at no point in the chain of events does it feel (or look) real.And if you put it next to that jetpack sequence thunderball, It feels even worse.I’m as stupid as a jetpack thunderball So it’s still based in reality. Bond wears a ugly but protective helmet. He glides through the air like an action figure on a leash, but in a working jetpack. He doesn’t defy physics like Brosnan’s Bond, he just bends it a little.

Today, we have small personal helicopters and we occasionally see drones that work just a little bit smarter than they actually are. But for the most part, spy movies and TV shows have done away with goofy gadgets on the brink of reality. It is believed more and more.

This… makes sense. We wear watches that can take calls and track our every move. We carry mobile phones that are as powerful (and in some cases as capable) as traditional computers, packed with everything in our lives. You can also purchase smart glasses. Smart glasses are ugly, but they can do a fair amount of what spy movies promise. .

We are pretty gadget savvy. As such, the science that hackers come into play makes it more difficult to find his spot in a suite of technologies that are close enough to reality without diving into fiction. As Dr. Albion and I talked, it became clear where the gadget had gone. A new breed of Swiss Army knife, a techie who could do it all.

And hackers aren’t the only ones who can control computers via USB sticks, use Bluetooth sniffers and watches to disable anyone’s wireless connection. That’s something many of us can do right now, if we’re shopping at the right DIY shops and hanging out in the right cacophony. Hackers in the espionage genre have developed godlike skills. They “can do some pretty amazing things,” Dr. Albion told me.

If you stop and think about it, six “hackers” must come to mind. true lie there is one Mission Impossible franchise.There are even fewer spy-fi shows like slow horse and Killing Eve Count super hackers in the cast. In the spy genre, you can’t shake a stick without attacking someone who can hack into every mainframe ever mentioned.

And the wonders of what these hackers can do with computers sometimes hit the same sweet spot that James Bond could throw a jetpack at. I have seen many times in the news how much impact it has. So there is both anxiety and comfort in an intelligence community filled with people who sift through data like sages and use it only for good.

There’s not much difference between a spy wearing good looking smart glasses with incredible facial recognition tech and a spy opening a computer stolen from a coffee shop to hack the NSA. But if you’re anything like me, you’d rather believe hackers than people making good-looking smart glasses.

But there is one big problem I have with replacing gadgets with hackers. Watching someone type on a computer screen isn’t as glamorous as a jetpack or his 1963-used wireless pager. With love from Russia Or even the aforementioned spyglass. Seeing fake teeth filled with toxic gas is no fun. Hackers, even the extremely powerful hackers you see in most spy shows these days, may be more trustworthy than jetpacks, but they’re not all that interesting.

Correction April 26th at 11:05am ET: An earlier version of this story incorrectly stated that Dr. Alexis Albion’s name was Alexia. I’m sorry.