(Credits: Far Out / Alamy)
Sun 1 June 2025 21:30, UK
Most movies set in the future have pretty bleak expectations. They usually involve some form of dystopia, whether it’s a barren wasteland torn asunder by civil war or bloodlust in outer space. If a film looks like it’s set in utopia, fast-forward to the end. Things are guaranteed to get ugly.
Most movies about the future get things laughably wrong. 2001: A Space Odyssey imagined the cosmos as a heavily trafficked transit area in which spaceships flitted from planet to planet to take suited businessmen to board meetings. That might not exactly be the film’s premise, but it is the setting. Back to the Future II set expectations way too high when it predicted that in the year 2015, teens would be zipping around suburbia on hoverboards. They also imagined a world in which fax machines were conveniently affixed to mailboxes, so they weren’t thinking too far ahead on everything.
Some movies got some general things right about the future, but took such a big swing that specific inaccuracies overshadow those general accuracies. Ridley Scott’s Blade Runner predicted environmental destruction, overcrowding, and artificial intelligence, but the flying cars have yet to come to fruition.
The movies that got the future right were not dreaming up exciting new methods of transportation. They were predicting the breakdown of the media, police brutality caught on camera, reality TV, and an increasingly unimportant and imbecilic United States of America. All of them are almost certainly less entertaining to watch now than they would have been when they were released. Comedy turns to all-too-familiar tragedy, wild flights of imagination turn to grim docudrama. Still, we should give credit where credit is due.
Five movies that predicted the present:
Related Topics
Subscribe To The Far Out Newsletter