Groundhog Day was billed as a screwball romantic comedy when it was first released in 1993. Twenty years on, it’s now being described as a ‘profound work of metaphysics’. Antony Funnell spoke to Groundhog Day’s screenwriter Danny Rubin, and three other experts, in his quest to discover the best films about tinkering with the future.

The classic Bill Murray comedy Groundhog Day was an instant hit when it was released in 1993 and is now celebrating its twentieth anniversary. Marketed as a screwball romance, the film has grown in stature over the past two decades. It’s been celebrated by the New York Museum of Modern Art and described by Ryan Gilbey in The Guardian as ‘one of the most influential films in modern cinema’.

Writing in The Atlantic in March 2013, James Parker went further, describing Groundhog Day as a ‘profound work of contemporary metaphysics’. He wrote: ‘The movie spoke to me … this bizarre romantic comedy about a grumpy, middle-aged weatherman who must relive the same day over and over until at last he bursts the spirit’s sleep and gets Andie MacDowell to fall in love with him. It spoke at me, in my deeper-than-deep cluelessness, with intimacy and authority: it was a message.’

I have to confess that Groundhog Day is one of my favourite films ever. At first glance, it’s about a man trapped in a recurring past, but as the movie progresses, it slowly becomes clear that it’s actually the story of a man taking control of his future. The film’s central message is subtle, its script is deftly crafted and unexpectedly complex. So clever, in fact, that people of all types and beliefs keep claiming it as their own. A point also made by the film’s director Harold Ramis at the Hudson Union Society in New York.

pull quote 'I heard from people in the yoga community… I started getting letters from Catholic priests and Christian and Baptist ministers … and then the psychiatric community chimed in and said obviously the movie is a metaphor for psycho-analysis.’

‘When the movie opened my producing partner Trevor Albert called me and said there are picketers outside the theatre in Santa Monica,’ Ramos told his audience. ‘I said what are they protesting? He said, they’re not protesting, they’re Hasidic Jews walking around with signs saying: "Are you living the same day over and over again?" Then I heard from people in the yoga community … I started getting letters from Catholic priests and Christian and Baptist ministers … and then the psychiatric community chimed in and said obviously the movie is a metaphor for psycho-analysis.’

Groundhog Day’s screenwriter Danny Rubin now teaches his craft at Harvard University. He told me from his home outside Boston that the film endures because of its narrative of redemption.

‘I think that this movie in a very honest way does what a lot of Hollywood movies do in a dishonest way, and that is that the character does seem to earn the good things that happen to him at the end,’ Mr Rubin said. ‘So his redemption, his change, seems to have come about in a natural way, not in a way that was just contrived for the movie. And I think that makes people very hopeful. They see the movie and they realise how empowered they are to change their own day. So I think for that reason, anybody would want to embrace it as a positive force in their life, as something that could be inspirational.’

The outpouring of praise for Groundhog Day—in celebration of its twentieth anniversary—caught our imagination at Future Tense and got us thinking about other films that play with the future in an interesting or clever way. As a result, we’ve compiled the beginnings of a list which we’re keen to have you contribute to.

Our initial list, it must be said, is far from exhaustive, but it’s been put together with suggestions from three very astute and thoughtful individuals: Mike Jones from the Australian Film, Television and Radio School; Melbourne-based writer and commentator Lauren Rosewarne; and UK futurist and author Richard Watson. We approached each for their suggestions, with just one caveat: nothing obvious like Blade Runner, 2001: A Space Odyssey or Tron.

Here are their nominations, starting with Danny Rubin talking about his own film:

1. Groundhog Day (Danny Rubin)

‘I think if you're happy with your present, then believing that the future is not going to be any different would be a comfort, and if you're not particularly happy with the present, then thinking that the future will never change is like a nightmare. It's a terrible thing to live without hope that there can be change.

'The idea of a person just repeating the same day occurred to me as a funny idea … but I put it down for a couple of years and didn't really think about it until I was thinking really about a person's life and their journey through life, and I was wondering if maybe for some people one lifetime just isn't enough, and if they lived longer than that maybe they would have enough time to change and actually grow up. I was thinking about that as a movie and realising it was a very cumbersome premise to have all this great time span before your character … and I realised that you could get eternity all on the same day just by putting it into a loop, and that's how those two ideas kind of reinforced each other. So it was always about a human life—like Siddhartha, a young man's journey through life. But once you brought in the repetition all these wonderful things happened.’

2. Eternal Sunshine of the Spotless Mind (Mike Jones)

‘Eternal Sunshine of the Spotless Mind is a film that takes a character who is heartbroken … he enlists the services of a company that promises to erase those memories, to erase the memory of this woman he loves. So the film is dealing with memory in a really interesting way.

'When I got thinking about visions of the future that feel profound or feel very sharp in the way we engage with the 21st-century world, this was the film that stood out for me. Not space ships or laser guns or robots, but the ability to manipulate memories themselves, and that I might go to a company to take away something that's too painful to live with.

'But what's also interesting about it is that the idea that surgery, or a machine, or a medical scientific process could selectively erase memories is dangerously close to our real world. It feels, oh boy, that could be tomorrow.

'And it's not necessarily whether physically or literally we could do it, but it feels so close to the bone in the way science and technology allows us to see inside ourselves and manipulate ourselves and understand ourselves. When we can read our genetic code and when that genetic code can be sold to an insurance company we're kind of down a road that is incredibly confronting about what is most important to us in the way science progresses.'

3. Another Earth (Lauren Rosewarne)

‘The premise of the film is that another Earth, Earth 2, is spotted in the skyline, and then four years after first spotting it they make contact with it and find that it is an exact replica of Earth 1, and that everybody there and every scenario is an exact mirror to Earth 1, the only difference is that once we saw each other … and this is where they postulate the broken mirror thesis, that once we noticed them and they noticed us, the differences stop, that that awareness changes our destiny.

'I'm not personally very interested in sci-fi, and I think this gave an example of a sci-fi film that was quite different from what we are usually expecting from that genre. And it gave a vision of the future which appeals to me in that it wasn't very different from now. [T]hose madcap futures that have nothing similar are very hard for me to imagine, whereas the idea of a future that is just a little bit different, I buy that, and this is very much what Another Earth was.’

4. Dr Strangelove (Richard Watson)

‘This would be one of my top five films about anything. It's about nuclear Armageddon, a mind gone mad, somebody who decides to launch a nuclear attack on Russia without permission. The initial reason I'm fond of this film from a sort of futures perspective is one of the real-life characters that Dr Strangelove is actually based on is somebody called Herman Kahn from the Rand Corporation, and he was one of the very early pioneers of scenario planning or scenario thinking, which is a way of actually dealing with the future.

'The film is a satire about war and it's particularly about the idea of mutually assured destruction or MAD. And I really like this film because it's funny, it's a black comedy, which much of life is as far as I can see, and it also quite critically highlights the fact that we worry about things that we don't understand or we worry about things that we can't control.

'I think what happens is when the future finally shows up, we are not as worried about the things that we thought we'd be worried about, we've invented something new to worry about. It also taps into this general unease around any new technology. We worry about technology more than we worry about geopolitical power shifts, for example.’

Think you know a better futurological flick? Let us know below. Or vote for one of these four films in our special poll on the RN Facebook page.