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An old staple of Sci Fi.  Lasers, often used as weapons in sci fi films.  This started as Light Amplification by Stimulated Emission of Radiation.

Lasers are light, very focused and amplified.  But the problem with older sci fi films is they often show lasers moving slower than bullets.  In reality lasers move at the speed of light.  So they would be nearly impossible to dodge.

But in spaceship to spaceship battles we often see lasers doing incredible damage to spaceships, sometimes destroying them outright.  In reality in order to do this, they would need a vast amount of power.  The systems to generate this power would be far bigger than the spaceships can house.  I mean they use a lase system in our military to take down enemy missiles.  But the power system to accommodate this is in a plane the size of a 747.  But I know fictional starships are often bigger than 747s.  What I don't understand in these old sci fi films is why they don't color the spaceships a chrome silver.  That's all you need to deter a laser, a simple mirror.  You don't need some complex force field system.  That would never work.

But I have noticed in recent years that sci fi films have abandoned lasers in favor of flak and missile systems.  These would be more plausible as a weapon because in the depths of space, there is no air.  So these wouldn't be slowed down by air-resistance.  They would keep going at their speeds until interrupted by something like their intended target.

But I have noticed some trends in sci fi.  They are getting either more plausible (Battlestar Galactica) or are happening much further into the future (Chronicles of Riddick.)

RE: Energy Weapons...

Power options are a science fiction staple.
Take the Matter-Anti-Matter trick in Trek. Its not only a 'facinating' thought on how they provides the power, but what kind of materials are needed to handle the 'rush.'

I still get irked by the need in Trek to fight at 'spittin' distance', when ST/TOS made clear phasers could operate at huge distances. My Technobabble about that- They applied a short lived warp field that fed off the total beam energy, and keep the phaser (Which is a combo Laser/Particle cannon) fast enough to be used at...well, in Starfleet Battles, a Phasers 1 (Biggest ship phaser) is effective out to range five. After that, It really starts dissipating.
As one hex in SFB is 40.000 klicks...40.00 X 5 is...is a lot!

The trend is that they lack imagination and are trying too hard to be gritty and "realistic".  Not something I care for. 

That's a goo point!  That must be why in the classic Sci-fi movies the only time they ever used lasers were on the ground with laser pistols. You never saw them firing on ships or if they did they didn't do much damage. Must be because the ships were chrome saucers, and the lasers jus must have bounced off!

Death Rays, Disintegration Rays, Heat Rays, Ray Guns, and other similary named energy weapons were part of Sci-fi before real-life lasers were invented.  Producers use the term laser because it's easy to understand, and it seems close to the older stuff. 

I'd assume advanced future technology would be able to solve any power problems.

Technically, this wouldn't work on a high powered laser in real life.  The laser would generate enough heat to melt through the mirror.  Still, fiction shows lasers capable of destroying space ships deterred by mirrors, so, from an in-story perspective, your right.

(http://mlkshk.com/r/4863)