Since at least the 1920's there have been some kind of beam weapon or another in science fiction books and movies.  Often they are consider lasers and have some bad physics built in.  Maybe its to make them more angelus to guns.

Problem one:  The speed of a laser.
The speed of almost all lasers are the speed of light.  This means if someone shoots a laser at your, your not going to be able to duck and watch it zing by, since you are much slower then light.  Also this means you wouldn't be able to see the laser until it reflected off something.  So this picture would never happen in space:

Picture from: http://www.ugcs.caltech.edu/~werdna/sttng/sttng-4.html

Problem two: reflections
When you see a reflection the photons in the laser beam have hit the target and are not being absorbed, and they are reflected back.  For shiny metals that are polished smooth the (visible) laser would simply reflect off the target.  Also if the laser was perfectly absorbed it wouldn't reflect at all and you wouldn't see anything.  Also the roughness of the surface changes how the photons would reflect off the target surface.    This is one of the reasons that lasers weren't used for a spaced based inter-continental ballistic missile interceptor program.  If the bad guys knew what type of lasers we were using they could design a missile that was an excellent reflector of that wavelength and the missile wouldn't be damaged by the laser (Talbot (2))
 

Problem three: movement of the target
Often when someone is hit with a laser, it looks like they get shot and get knocked over.   We know from Newton's equations that F=MA. (Segway)  Since the mass of the ratio of the target to the mass of beam of the laser is just about infinity the target wouldn't move when hit a laser. (Talbot (2))

Problem four: sounds of lasers
I don't know what to say.  Light doesn't make noise!  Do you hear the light in a sunrise?