In Deep Rising, the Argonautica's sonar operator counts down the distance between the cruise ship and the rapidly-oncoming whatever-it-is that's rushing towards it from below.

Alabama has an encounter with a Russian Akula-class hunter-killer, leading to several minutes of playing cat-and-mouse and dodging torpedoes.

Crimson Tide has the scene where the U.S.S.

Colossus: The Forbin Project does this with great tension as the supercomputers launch a nuclear exchange between the US and USSR, all the top heads can do is watch the radar and hope the machines will intercept the nukes.

Modern ATC radar (especially at regional centers even in 1977) uses computer-generated data to display targets. This is Truth in Television, as that scene was filmed at Los Angeles ARTCC with actual controllers and radar displays.

Close Encounters of the Third Kind has the air traffic control scene, where the aircraft (and possible UFOs) are represented not by blips as such, but by basic text and graphics on radar-like screens.

Das Boot inverts this trope to great effect, as the sonar pings bouncing off the boat are being used to showcase how the Allied navy is hunting them.

Hudson: It's reading right, man, look! Five meters! Four. Ripley: That can't be, that's inside the room! Contrast The Croc Is Ticking, a technology-free method of building comparable suspense.Ĭaptain! The radar shows multiple Incoming! examples!

Naturally, this trope has some overlap with Bombers on the Screen and Enemy-Detecting Radar. Alternatively, the blips might suddenly disappear, which is even worse for the heroes. The closer the enemies get, the more rapid the beeping gets, until it becomes a maddeningly nerve-shredding screech that more often than not causes heroes to snap at just that wrong moment before the monsters burst through and pull them under.Ī more recent usage of this trope is to have lots of blips on the radar display or to have a really big blip appear, as a precursor to something really bad happening.

Yet, this can sometimes amplify the tension of a scene, especially if the actual visual appearance of the objects being tracked is unknown. Such devices generally don't do much more than show some blips while making bleeping noises. Sometimes, the only way to keep track of objects is through crude sensors or motion-tracking devices.

Supreme commander maps 81km