5 Movies That Wouldn’t Be Movies—If Only For Sync

We love to be entertained, of course, and creating drama in a storyline makes for compelling movies and TV. But we can’t help noticing how many movies would be so much shorter if the characters just used Sync.

At the risk of pooping the party, there might be a few plot spoilers ahead, so proceed with an appropriate amount of caution.

5. 24: Live Another Day

Not really a movie, but Jack Bauer starts us off, and this season he’s not driving all over Los Angeles faster than is actually possible. No, he’s driving all over England this time, risking innocent lives and killing dozens by spending inordinate amounts of time transferring files from computer to computer using USB keys.

4. The Pelican Brief

Sure, it’s 1993, and cloud storage is barely a twinkle in an engineer’s eye. But with all the drama surrounding a particular document, it’s almost hard to understand how this movie could even be made now.

You’ve got some damning evidence, and you’re carrying a single copy of it around with you in a briefcase?! That’s crazy talk. Scan it, upload it to Sync, and boom—you’re done. You could even create a dead man’s switch that posts a secure link to the file.

If the information is as explosive as the dossier in The Pelican Brief, there’s no need to keep the originals.

3. Johnny Mnemonic

Picture four movie executives all sharing port and cigars. In a gravelly voice, worn with experience, one says “It’s Keanu Reeves, and he has a hard drive.”

Chuckles all around.

“In his head.” Jaws drop. Monocles pop out of eye sockets. (Movie executives wear monocles in the ’90s, right? Just go with it.)

So in the year 2021, Ted here can hold 160GB in his noggin, which doesn’t sound too bad, actually, because he could have probably just glued a Micro SD card behind his ear with some gum. (Both ears and he doubles the storage!)

Or, we could be even bigger buzzwrecks and suggest that maybe “data couriers” aren’t really needed at all. Put the file on Sync, invite a few friends to the folder, and suddenly an action-packed, bullet-riddled adventure through the streets of Japan seems so unnecessary.

2. Sex Tape

We’ll admit that we haven’t seen this movie—it opens on Friday—but if the trailer is any indication, this movie will probably be a blockbuster endorsement of cloud storage, in the same way that Radar Secret Service was for radar, and The Net was for ordering pizza online.

The premise is pretty simple. A hot couple records a sex tape, and through a hysterical technological mix up, that video is sent to all their friends, acquaintances, and probably the queen of England. Hilarity ensues.

Clearly the guy from Freaks & Geeks picked the wrong cloud storage service to back up his computer. While we don’t think anyone would opt for any service with that “feature,” at least with Sync, there’s absolutely no automatic sharing.

1. Star Wars

Whaaaaat. We can hear you groaning. But hear us out: for the first part of the movie, R2-D2 is just a big thumb drive—well, a thumb drive with a three-dimensional projector and a smart mouth.

Let’s conveniently ignore the fact that this happened a long time ago in a galaxy far away, and think about how easy it could have been to get in touch with Obi Wan. Record a message, protect it using Sync’s state-of-the-art encryption, and upload it to Sync. Leia would do well to put it in her Vault, and securely destroy her local copy of the message.

Now, she’d just have to find a way to get the secure link to a guy’s house on a desert planet in the outer rim. Hey, maybe Artoo isn’t so useless after all.

What did we miss?

We probably missed the best movie or TV show plot that revolves around having information lost or stolen. Tweet us your top movies and TV shows that just wouldn’t be the same if they had used Sync. We’ll throw some free GBs to the tweets with the most favorites!