George Lucas and the release of Star Wars in the 1970s unintentionally set a precedent for how almost every single piece of sci-fi media would depict space combat. Small spaceships fighting each other above in the atmosphere is synonymous with the genre, but does the science support this World War II style of dog-fighting in SPACE?
If any one wants an idea of how hard actual space combat would be. Spend sometime playing Kerbal Space program.
Or Children of a Dead Earth.