Good videos with the emotional impact of something failing?

September 19, 2016 4:34 PM

Good videos with the emotional impact of something failing? Like, something engineered failing or some software or some contraption failing and people being disappointed by it. Fiction or nonfiction, both are good. Software specifically would be nice, but other failures are good, just with the emotional impact, too.
posted by hleehowon to Computers & Internet (12 answers total)

Maybe watch a lot of Halt and Catch Fire. Lots of scenes of software and servers failing and people reacting to those failures.

And this classic from Deskset shows what happens the poor old Emerac Mainframe falls apart. There's some emotional fallout and a little glee.
posted by brookeb at 5:46 PM on September 19, 2016 [1 favorite]

"The hyperdrive motivator has been damaged!"
posted by praemunire at 5:47 PM on September 19, 2016

The climax of Silicon Valley, Season 1. It involves a lot of servers failing in a bunch of interesting ways.
If you want to go dark, the Joker's detonator failing in Dark Knight.
posted by Charlemagne In Sweatpants at 5:57 PM on September 19, 2016 [2 favorites]

Chemical Brothers' "Believe"
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=_UkWcXizRwU
posted by evilmonk at 5:59 PM on September 19, 2016

Also, Iron Man has a little trouble with his suit.
posted by praemunire at 6:01 PM on September 19, 2016

Also, from about 51:30 to 53:30 of The Imitation Game, when they come to realize that the fancy new code-cracking machine can't calculate fast enough.
posted by praemunire at 6:10 PM on September 19, 2016

Does this video of an RC plane disintegrating meet the criteria?
posted by phil at 6:15 PM on September 19, 2016

Half an hour of rockets making "rocket science" look hard.
posted by traveler_ at 6:44 PM on September 19, 2016 [1 favorite]

B29: Frozen in Time.
posted by smcameron at 7:52 PM on September 19, 2016

This is sooooo not software, but one of the most fascinating things about watching The Great British Bake Off is seeing extremely competent people do things that should work, but that fail, and how they cope with that failure.
posted by ocherdraco at 8:45 PM on September 19, 2016

Imitation game is Alan Turing continuously attempting to make his computer work to break the enigma code but watching it fail over and over
posted by christiehawk at 11:08 PM on September 19, 2016

Thanks for trying.
posted by Hildegarde at 5:40 PM on September 20, 2016