On the flip side of that, you really want to
avoid their mistakes. Nearly all futuristic scifi movies make the same mistakes of being overwrought and pretentious. Most of the bad movies in the genre--and many of the good ones as well--love to rub your face in the technobabble and overstate their ideas of what the future should be like. The worst part is that noone cracks any jokes; especially in a dystopian, depressing future humor should be a part of everyday life or else everyone would be dying of depression.
Firefly is a great example of a movie that bucks these huge mistakes. By making the characters the focus rather than the technology, Joss Shedon really made that movie something that people can connect with, turning the setting into the backdrop that it's supposed to be rather than the main focus.
Another thing I really liked about that movie was the emphasis on how
history--not just the angsty pasts of the characters--is constantly being carried forward into the future. The scenes at the temple and the old yet still thriving mining town were absolutely beautiful and helped anchor all the futuristic stuff into the past.
Finally the characters didn't always take themselves seriously. The storyline was a serious one, and so were the characters, when the chips were down and the bullets were flying. But when they had the time, they had fun; they teased each other; they made jokes; they made snarky little comments that never broke character, but made their characters human in a way that all the serious posturing in the world never could. All good scifi movies have a few elements of this; even the first
Matrix had the "digital pimp," which mystified me all the more when the second and third movies mostly did not.