

Making fun of how movies screw up the future is one of the main reasons why the Internet was invented. The video above does a good job of kicking off the conversation about a few places where Hollywood has and hasn’t gotten it right when it comes to predicting what may come to pass—Jurassic Park’s cloned dinos will likely never be a reality, but Zemeckis and Co. managed a pretty passable hit with predicting a hoverboard in 2015 in Back to the Future II (though Lexus’ supercooled superconducting magnet stunt isn’t anywhere near the free-roaming Mattel-branded boards in the film).

But rather than just leaving it there, we wanted to go a little further with some jumping off points for discussion. I combed through my movie library and came up with a half-dozen more movies that were set in the near future (and some of those "future" dates are now in our present-day past!). All of these films showcase some kind of vision of the way things could have been—though in most cases, it’s probably good that the future has taken a different course.

2010 (1984)



Stanley Kubrick’s 1968 masterpiece 2001: A Space Odyssey regularly tops best-of lists in just about every relevant category, but in many ways its 1984 sequel is a much more engaging movie, especially to mainstream audiences expecting an accessible adventure. It’s much less of a film and much more of a movie—it follows a more traditional structure and even takes a stab at answering the unanswerable questions about what happened in 2001. But even as it does so, it robs the first film of some magic by supplying mundane explanations to decades-old mysteries. HAL killed the Discovery’s crew because he was given conflicting goals. The White House and the NSA authorized HAL to know about the monolith. Set against the almost fairytale space-ballet of the first film, clunky mundane words like "White House" and "NSA" feel like badly aimed bricks.

I have a soft spot for the film, standing as it does sort of on the bridge between Clarke’s slickly utopian machines-as-humans future and a grittier, '70s-influenced, hard-bitten dystopian corporate vision of the way things might be (though Hyams’ 1981 film Outland is far dirtier and grittier—and has far more exploding heads!). But like most films from the Cold War era, it failed to predict the end of Communism and the downfall of the Soviet Union. The central conflict in the film involves the Cold War turning very, very hot, and the lesson we’re supposed to take away—emphasized clumsily by a message from aliens—is that we need to all play nice because we’re all people.

Then again, the film did get something very, very right about space travel in the 2010s: Americans are still, as they say in the movie, hitching rides with Russians.

Strange Days (1995) and Brainstorm (1983)

I was going to list these two movies separately, but they both missed the boat in basically the same way. Both movies predict a future wherein we can not only record a person’s thoughts, feelings, and senses but also play them back like a DVD (or, more appropriate to both films’ eras, a videocassette).

Strange Days stars Ralph Fiennes and Juliette Lewis and focuses on premillennial hysteria. Fiennes is a dealer in SQUID tapes—that’s "superconducting quantum interference device." It’s the thing you wear on your head to record your thoughts. The movie asks questions about the nature of self and death, and it does so in a wholly ersatz '90s way—even the dirty street scenes include at least a few pastels. But although it makes for a neat plot device and a great McGuffin, the idea that by 1999 we’d be able to record experiences (up to and including death) and play them back was a swing and a miss.

Brainstorm has the same conceit—recording and playing back thoughts and experiences—but stars Christopher Walken as a researcher instead of Voldemort as a street dealer (the movie also has a lot more wood paneling because, hey, 1983). As in Strange Days, the movie spends no small amount of time dealing with what happens when someone dies with the recording device on and what happens when someone plays back that recording. Brainstorm is the better film—it was produced and directed by Hollywood renaissance man Doug Trumbull–and I don’t mind telling you that it terrified the crap out of me when I was little and it would come on HBO.

But, as with Strange Days, we just can’t record thoughts and play them back. Not yet, anyway.

No Escape (1994)



Take a wiseguy, a Ghostbuster, and an android, throw them onto a corporate prison island, and what do you get? 1994’s No Escape, that’s what!

Ray Liotta stars with Ernie Hudson and Lance Henriksen in this film which, honestly, I forgot I even had on my movie shelf—because it’s a pretty forgettable film. But it plays into a pretty common cinematic trope: at some point, it’s going to be more cost-effective to farm prisons out to corporations than to have local, state, or federal governments run them. In this case, Liotta gets banished to an entire prison island, sort of like Australia, but even more dangerous.

"Corporations" make for an easy bugbear in films—everyone agrees that past a certain point they’re "bad," and it’s easy to construct a corporate entity in a film that lacks any hint of moral scruples and on which any kind of terrible behavior can be pinned. But, at least for now, we’re not so far into the dystopian future that amoral corporations can run penal colonies.

Update: A lot of folks are pointing out that private prisons are totally a thing and that they're gaining in popularity. Guess it's time to start sharpening my teeth and working on my Bear Grylls-style water conservation skills.

The two good Terminator movies

There is no fate but what we make. If a machine, a Terminator, can learn the value of human life–maybe we can, too. Those two sentences are the axioms of the two James Cameron-produced Terminator movies, which unlike the messy and disjointed follow-ups are actually really great movies. Mankind develops AI—possibly due to a recursive causality loop!—and then tries to kill the AI because holy crap, we accidentally developed AI. AI fights back, triggers nuclear annihilation, and the stage is set for decades of movies and fanfic.

So what did Terminator get wrong? We can dismiss the robots and time travel parts as more fun sci-fi than actual predictions, but the causal factor is the thing to focus on: developing AI by 1997.

Even though the first movie doesn’t give a date to Skynet’s birth (future freedom fighter Kyle Reese merely chalks it up to defense computers that got smart "a few years from now," where "now" equalled 1984), and even though the second movie shows that scientists only developed AI because they had a half-destroyed CPU from the first movie’s Terminator, we can still chalk up the somewhat near-term development of AI as a swing and a miss.

In fact, although I didn’t mention it in the section on 2010, both it and its Kubrickian predecessor also made the same swing and miss. AI is proving to be a remarkably difficult problem to tackle, and famous scientists concerns notwithstanding, a fully person-intelligent computer that can pass the Turing test is almost certainly something no one alive today will live to see.

The Lawnmower Man (1992)



"By the turn of the millennium a technology known as VIRTUAL REALITY will be in widespread use," says the movie’s opening card. "It will allow you to enter computer generated artificial worlds as unlimited as the imagination itself. Its creators foresee millions of positive uses—while others fear it as a new form of mind control…"

The hardest thing to believe about Lawnmower Man was that the people making it were actually serious. Although the movie now is laughably, terribly, execrably bad, at the time it was considered a somewhat-legit take on how the upcoming "virtual reality" craze might play out. However, the movie succeeded in ways I don’t think its creators anticipated—rather than warning people that VR might have subversive uses and should be approached carefully, it really just ended up telling us all that VR was terrible and dumb.

I remember sneaking into the theater at the local mall to watch Lawnmower Man—something that had been expressly forbidden by my parents, who were convinced that the movie was going to be like a mash-up of The Thing and The Exorcist with computers added in—and leaving with an overwhelming feeling of relief for not having wasted my meager 8th grade allowance funds on a ticket.

This movie was so bad—both from an overall plot standpoint and also specifically in how it portrayed "virtual reality"—that it almost singlehandedly stalled any meaningful research into consumer head-mounted displays and useful augmented/virtual reality consumer tech for two full decades. This wasn’t just a swing and a miss on how future VR tech might play out—it was a massive nuclear-scale assault on common sense and decency.

Listing image by New Line Cinema