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15 Feb 2024

Great movies and their failed future predictions

Glenn Cochrane

STACK Senior Editor

The key to making futuristic science fiction movies that hold up is to disregard timestamps. In fact, a note to filmmakers would be to set their movies in a non-specific future so that time itself can't catch up and expose their misjudged predictions.

It's even worse when the forecasted future dates are featured in the movie's title, especially when said date is within the viewer's lifetime.

Take George Orwell's 1984 for example. A brilliant story adapted into a brilliant film, but it was a good four decades off the mark. Admittedly the current state of the world is looking more and more like Orwell's grim prophecy by the day, but when the year 1984 came around, we were still wearing oversized suits, big shoulder pads, and desert boots.

So let's have some fun and take a look at a handful of movies that dared to predict the future and missed the mark.

2001 A Space Odyssey

2001: A Space Odyssey (1968)

We're going to cut Arthur C. Clarke and Stanley Kubrick some slack, because 2001: A Space Odyssey remains one of the most mind-blowing, awe-inspiring and revolutionary films of all time. It's a spectacle like no other that remains unrivalled.

But, of course, the elephant in the room is the year itself. According to the film, space travel had been well and truly commercialised by the late 1990s, and the moon was colonised.

But on the flip side, the film did make some scarily accurate predictions in terms of tech, and although calling out the year 2001 was a little too ambitious, there's no doubt that they had the future pegged. Take artificial intelligence and computers, for example.

The film depicts an entire space spaceship controlled by a super-computer known as HAL-9000, and small touchscreen tablet devices containing entertainment, news and other information. Add to that the depiction of flat screen televisions and face-to-face video conference calling, amongst other things, and we can happily give Kubrick a pass.

Terminator

Terminator (1984)

Once again, we know that the first two Terminator movies are sci-fi classics and we'll be the first in line to see them return to the big screen.

But it's hard to ignore the 2029 future time point from where Kyle Reese is sent to the past, or, better yet, the 1997 date of Judgement Day whereby the Skynet Group gains self-awareness and launches a nuclear attack on humanity.

From our current vantage point of 2024, the whole premise of James Cameron's seminal franchise has become a little too close for comfort, and the rise of AI is no longer a fantasy.

But we think that old mate James definitely got a little ahead of himself by predicting a dystopian 2029.

Blade Runner

Blade Runner (1982)

We know what you're thinking. “But these films are masterpieces!”, and we agree, they are. But look at Ridley Scott's Blade Runner. Was giving the story a timestamp necessary?

The dystopian Los Angeles with its flying cars, synthetic humans and, ahem, public smoking is set in the year 2019.

We see Harrison Ford's Rick Deckard running through slick city streets, surrounded by neon signs and digital billboards chasing robots while surrounded by people dressed for the '80s. It's a futuristic world with an old school sense of style that might as well be another universe entirely.

But damn, we love it. And hey, they kind of got the whole smart home thing right.

Back to the Future Part II

Back to the Future Part II (1989)

We don't really know why Back to the Future Part II gets better with age, it just does. Perhaps its saving grace - in relation to its ludicrous future setting - is the fact that it's comedic by default and was never meant to be taken seriously, let alone analysed.

Dr. Emmett Brown shoves a bunch of rubbish into the Mr. Fusion energy reactor of his DeLorean time machine and whisks Marty McFly away to the future year of 2015, where clothing is self-adjusting, digital newspapers are still in print form, and pizzas miraculously hydrate.

Never mind the fact that drones walk dogs, or that fax machines are a common method of communication, it was the hoverboard that really got our goats.

Back in the late '80s, there was an urban legend that the makers of Back to the Future Part II had produced functional hoverboards, and every kid on the planet wanted one.

The fact that this special effect was achieved with wires was a deception almost too cruel to bear and had us cursing the makers for decades.

Escape From New York

Escape from New York (1981)

In the late 1970s and early '80s, a lot of American cities were riddled with crime and the future was looking bleak. Therefore, it makes sense that Hollywood would make bold predictions about where the world was headed. Let's use Escape from New York as our example, although you could switch it out with a bunch of films like RoboCop (1987), Predator 2 (1990), and Cyborg (1989)

The story is set in 1997 and depicts America with a 400% increase in crime. To deal with the widespread criminal element, the government turned the island of Manhattan into a maximum security prison. With no law and order within its confines, the prison society is shown as a barbaric almost post-apocalyptic junkyard.

Fortunately, John Carpenter is one of the most beloved filmmakers on the planet and no amount of future prediction screw-ups could waver our devotion. Escape from New York is a bloody ripper!

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