Over the hundred-year history of movies, countless films have
taken on the task of representing the future. If that riot of celluloid has one
common idea, it is this: Tomorrow will be pretty bleak, but it will be big.
By the movies' estimation, at the turn of the millennium humanity
is supposed to be -- variously -- wiped out by nuclear war, turned into albino
vampires (except for Charlton Heston), dominated by a Russo-American
supercomputer, reduced to cannibalism by environmental collapse (except for
Charlton Heston), tormented by giant floating stone heads and overwhelmed by
rioting monkeys (except for Charlton Heston). In short, a future considerably
more interesting than the one we ended up with, even though Charlton Heston
continues to remain at the center of things.
So, watching these films for a glimpse of tomorrow may not be the
most profitable exercise. But watching them for a glimpse of yesterday is
considerably more rewarding. For while they haven't told us what the future
will be like, these millennial movies provide an intriguing window into the
eras in which they were made.
The sci-fi screen is where we project our anxieties about
technology. It's where we exaggerate our collective social subconscious. And
even when plot lines seem free of any contemporary relevance, the sets, props
and overall designs reflect one age looking toward another through itself. Even
the outlandishness of the films' specific predictions is revealing, for in
exaggerating the details of the future, the movies reveal ever more sharply the
fears and hopes of the culture that made them.
Soylent Green, for instance, set in 2022, combines the pollution
and population anxieties of the mid-1970s into a single horror -- a foodstuff
that gives whole new meaning to "You are what you eat." Or take
Colussus: The Forbin Project, a 1969 film. in which a megacomputer takes over
the world. Sure, the vision of a thinking machine that speaks plain English and
wants to be God looks hokey in a world with a crash-prone PC on every desk. But
if you're old enough, think back three decades to when people were just getting
accustomed to the banal finality of the machines. It wasn't a far leap to think
these newfangled horrors were just a little malicious.
With that in mind, here's a chronological narrative of the major
milestones in film futurism -- and what those movies have to tell us about
yesterday as well as tomorrow. A couple of warnings, though. These are just the
highlights, not a comprehensive list. And, while many of these films are true
epics, more than a handful aren't exactly up to "Citizen Kane"
standards of character development, acting or dialogue. But every one of them
provides food for thought.
Even if it IS Soylent Green.
Between Wars: Wells's Mark
Even before the talkies cemented their hold on the movies, cinema
had presented a Jazz Age version of tomorrow. The first milestone was Fritz
Lang's Metropolis of 1927. The social tumult of the decade had been grist for
artists from F. Scott Fitzgerald to Cole Porter, but Lang was perhaps the first
filmmaker to capture key anxieties of the '20s -- the dehumanizing horrors of the
assembly line, the gap between rich and poor, the shock of new scientific
discoveries.
Lang depicted the future as a huge factory, stifled by
industrialization and overreaching progress. A thoroughly broken, spiritless
working class shuffles into factories straight out of Karl Marx's worst
nightmares, if not Dante's. A messianic figure appears, and the workers revolt
-- a prospect that seemed possible and palatable to many, with the Russian
Revolution just a few years in the past and its most horrific consequences yet
to come.
Standing on the shoulders of Metropolis, but far surpassing its
scope and vision, is Things to Come, H.G. Wells's pedagogical look at tomorrow.
In 1936, with memories of the Great War all too fresh and with Hitler and
Stalin taking the world stage, Wells the master futurist created a cautionary
tale about the incipient World War II -- and beyond. Soldiers fall on barbed
wire, tanks crawl across blasted landscapes, and the most feared weapon of the
Great War, poison gas, returns exponentially stronger.
After decades of fighting, mankind is reduced to scrambling
through the bombed-out shells of cities and living under tribal strongmen. But
Wells's mouthpiece protagonist appears, ready to rescue the world (wearing, it
must be noted, a comically oversized flying helmet). Played by the ever-angular
Raymond Massey, the airman represents a group called "Wings Over the
World" -- a league of gentleman intellectuals, a "freemasonry of
science," who are set upon rebuilding the world and eradicating the
mistakes of the past through technology and reason. Wells was calling on
society to redeem science by grabbing it from sullying hands -- from the
clearly monstrous Hitler to the more subtle perils of Henry Ford's assembly
line -- and returning it to the thinkers.
The film ends with humanity ensconced in bright subterranean
honeycombs -- but still hungry for a challenge. One heroic character launches
an expedition into space and intones a challenge for his era, and for ours:
"All the universe or nothing! Which shall it be?"
It took the world three more years, to 1939, to answer that
question. It took movies over three decades.
The 50's: Trumped by Sputnik
After Things to Come, futurism in film, as an end unto itself,
took a nosedive. The 1950s inaugurated a golden age of science-fiction films,
but while many of them took place in the future, they didn't have the future as
their focus. In general, some of the most telling speculative films of that
period actually take place in contemporary settings, presenting a world
teetering on the brink of atomic war or accident (this was the wrong decade to
spill nuclear waste near insects) and rife with Cold War paranoia -- from the
disintegrating suburbia of Invasion of the Body Snatchers to the misinterpreted
parleys of The Day the Earth Stood Still.
When 1950s films did make excursions into tomorrow, the futures
reflect the decade's confidence, even if it is a short-sighted one. For
example, there's not much talk about Earth and its fate in Forbidden Planet,
but the crisp uniforms, sleek spaceship and brash manner of the interstellar
fleet provide subtextual clues: We will solve the world's problems, we will
make it into space, and we won't change much as people in the process. (If you
want to use 20/20 political hindsight, "we" will also be exclusively
white and male, not to mention American.)
Why the lack of fully realized tomorrows? Possibly because reality
had overtaken sci-fi. If you ask people to accept nuclear weapons, television
and Sputnik, all inside of a decade, the confusion over those advances is going
to make better fodder than some evergreen about starships and spacemen.
The '60s: A Long, Strange Trip
By the time the Summer of Love rolled around, the general
kookiness of the era had forced itself onto every aspect of popular culture.
Films about the future grew trippy and navel-gazing, eschewing action and
coherent plot for mind-blowing images and wild ideas. This new wave of sci-fi
films extrapolated the social conflicts that the Love Generation had spawned --
from race divisions to class conflicts to "ageism" against the young
-- while hinting at the transcendence the hippies promised but never quite
achieved.
Amid the clutter came Stanley Kubrick's 2001: A Space Odyssey, the
first film to really take the hippies' philosophical expansiveness to heart. If
you can use all of space and time as a canvas, why bother telling stories about
ray guns and Raquel Welch in a fur bikini?
The film starts about as far back as you can go and still tell a
story: the dawn of man. A tribe of proto-human creatures discovers a flawless
black monolith, which somehow inspires them to begin using tools. Cut to the
21st century. Destination: moon, where scientists have uncovered another
monolith, which promptly sends a radio signal toward Jupiter. A ship is
dispatched to investigate. En route, the computer turns homicidal. The
surviving astronaut lobotomizes the machine as it pleads (as calmly as it can)
for its life. Then he flies into one of the monoliths, where he undergoes a
psychedelic/Jungian transformation and is reborn as a glowing space-baby.
Simple enough, right?
On one level, the film affirms the hippie mind-set that mankind's
survival demands casting away technology and regaining its innocence. It could
be hazarded that even the mere idea of salvation through rebirth as a space
baby would have been impossible, or at least unfilmable, until the 1960s.
Look again, however, and Kubrick seems to be tweaking the crowds
that came to his film doped up to marvel at the light show. There are no
hippies in 2001, no radicals or seekers after truth. In fact, the whole world
of 2001 looks a bit like a square version of 1968: stewardesses on spaceships;
realpolitik squabbles with the Russians; perfunctory videophone calls to the
kids; engineers and pilots going about their jobs -- the sort of people who
conceived and implemented one of the other great movements of the era, the
space program. The hippies, in Kubrick's vision, leave little mark on the
future. Tomorrow, for better or worse, belongs to the bureaucrats and the guys
with slide rules in their pockets.
As the Bills Clinton and Gates will surely attest.
The '70s: Running on Empty
Depending on your spot in the political spectrum, after 1968 life
got either ugly or uglier, with a string of tragedies that effectively
destroyed the message of brotherhood and love. In the coming years, the
Watergate scandal would further poison the American landscape, while the energy
crisis and ecological movement drove home the idea that humanity may have
squeezed too hard in its grip of the Earth.
Speculative films -- like the rest of popular culture -- picked up
on this new, darker mood of thwarted idealism, depicting an
This era's avatar was, unquestionably, Charlton Heston. Star of
the first Apes film, Heston gets the whole world to himself in 1971's The Omega
Man. Germ warfare has wiped out most of the population and reduced the rest to
albino vampires who fear daylight and proceed to torch the artifacts of culture
and technology. Heston, an Army scientist who's immune to the plague, is one
artifact who won't hit the bonfire without a fight.
The subtext is the 1960s gone bad, with the vampires presenting a
nightmarish, Manson-esque version of hippie groupthink. Heston stands for
everything about
The next entry in Heston's end-of-the-world repertory was Soylent
Green of 1973, but this time the star turn belongs to Edward G. Robinson in his
final role. The pair are cops -- Heston does the head-busting, Robinson the
bookkeeping -- in a future
For once, Heston doesn't represent the virtues of days gone by --
he's as ugly and corrupt as his environment. Robinson, looking impossibly small
and frail in a white beard and a black beret, is the force of sanity here,
reminding young upstart Heston that there used to be unpolluted streams, food
for everyone and even books, millions of them. Playing the last man on Earth
with dignity, intelligence and wit, Robinson warns the future -- and the 1970s
-- that it's in danger of losing more than clean water and red meat.
Grim stuff. But there was room for a few laughs, too. In 1973,
Sleeper, one of Woody Allen's "early, funny" movies, sent up some of
sci-fi's hoariest shibboleths -- not to mention the bourgeois of the 1970s, who
were picking over the bones of hippie culture to create the Me Decade. Allen
plays Miles Monroe, a neurotic (of course) clarinetist and health-food-store
manager who is revived from a deep sleep two hundred years after a failed
peptic-ulcer operation. He quickly gets tangled in a plot to overthrow a
despot, impersonates a robot, falls in love with Diane Keaton, raises her
consciousness, lowers his own and slips on a giant banana peel.
The sets and props provide half the laughs. Every structure is a
World's Fair horror, a parody of the futurist styles in vogue: The buildings
look like everything from sheet-metal tacos to pie plates. And they're all
decked out with trappings that jab at the swinging '70s -- vinyl furniture,
globes that stand in for dope, and "Orgasmatrons," whose purpose
we'll leave to the imagination.
A much grittier post-hippie vision came in Rollerball, Norman
Jewison's 1975 epic, which targets the effete, drug-fueled decadence of the
upper crust, the growth of consumerism hand in hand with multinational
corporations and the distance of media figures from "real life." The
hero is James Caan's Jonathan E., who is Gordie Howe, Babe Ruth and Muhammad
Ali rolled into one: the toughest, longest-lasting player in a souped-up roller
derby played with motorcycles and spiked gloves.
The Energy Corporation, which runs Caan's roller-derby team -- not
to mention the city of Houston -- wants him to retire after 10 long years in
the sport. The message: Anyone is replaceable. The athlete turns from a man
grateful and a little baffled by his good fortune to one who questions
everything. How did corporations come to rule the world? What happened to
nations, to history itself?
Rollerball is the high-water mark for the cycle of futuristic
films that began with 2001. In 1977, Star Wars came along and threw sci-fi into
turmoil, making the genre marketable -- but as high adventure. That left
message-laden tales like Rollerball and trippy treatises like Zardoz or The
Final Programme dead in the water. Why sit through two hours of brooding
when you can see some spaceships blow up real good?
The '80s: Forward to the Past
So, as the decade turned, futuristic films got quicker and
dirtier. Mad Max (1979) and The Road Warrior (1981) ostensibly show a future
ravaged by environmental collapse and nuclear war, but they're basically excuses
for some of the best car chases outside of Steve McQueen. In Escape From New
York (1981), director John Carpenter comments on urban decay and rising crime
rates by sending the formidable Kurt Russell into a Manhattan island that's
been turned into a penitentiary.
But "deep" futurism would reclaim the high ground in
that most shallow of decades. For even more paradox, the decade's best films
about the future created stunningly complete visions not by extrapolating
current concerns, but by imagining how previous generations would have
envisioned the future.
In the basics, 1982's Blade Runner hews closely to its source, a
novel by sci-fi visionary Philip K. Dick: A Los Angeles cop is assigned to
track down and kill androids that are human lookalikes. The cop falls hard for
one of the androids -- and, it turns out, may be one himself. But director
Ridley Scott jettisoned the book's landscape -- a nearly depopulated Earth
devastated by ecological disasters -- in favor of an updated film noir
environment. It's rarely daytime in the L.A. of 2019, and the streets are never
dry. Everybody smokes and dresses to kill, particularly the femmes, who are of
course fatale.
For sci-fi design, Blade Runner is unparalleled. The future it
creates is one of the richest on film; visual consultants labored on every
detail, down to the daunting automated parking meters and the covers of
21st-century magazines glimpsed in passing at a newsstand.
As a measure of just how complete the film's vision is, Blade
Runner can boast that it actually changed the future. The future of design,
anyway. It's hard to overstate how many movies and TV shows aped, and continue
to ape, the film's midnight world of crowded streets and flickering neon. The
movie also created the visual reference for the computer-crazy
"cyberpunk" genre of sci-fi.
Yet, for all its retro stylings, Blade Runner does comment on its
own times, correctly forecasting the triumph of postmodernism and
multiculturalism -- then hardly household words -- as cultural motifs. In Blade
Runner's Los Angeles, cultures and styles butt up against each other, yet
everything fits, in its own ramshackle way. Pyramids loom over downtown, neon
signs flicker in any number of languages, video screens broadcast 10-story-high
commericals. The streets are impassable, crowded with vendors hawking
everything from noodles to genetic tests.
Just as stylishly based on the past, but considerably less
inviting, is Nineteen Eighty-Four, released in the year of the same name. When
George Orwell's classic novel was first filmed in 1954, the future it presented
was sleek and sterile; Big Brother might've been evil, but he made the trains
run on time. When Michael Radford gave his take in the year, he made an
imaginative leap backward, giving the film a grimy, low-tech look redolent of
London after the Blitz.
The familiar story is chilling by itself. But the look of the film
brings it to a new summit of panic and despair. The ubiquitous
"telescreens" broadcast in dingy brown-and-white; office workers
operate computers with rotary dials (which stick); for public transportation,
there's an overburdened steam locomotive.
For the rest of the decade, no film matched that pair, although
some of the quick-and-dirty crowd have left their mark. Robocop (1987) played
on the same fears of criminals and urban decay that spawned Escape From New
York, but took off in gleefully Jacobean directions, parodying the mass media
and vapidness of consumer culture along the way.
The '90s: Against Civility!
If a clear trend has been evident in '90s futurism, it's a revolt
against political correctness. A number of films -- notably, Demolition Man
(1993) and Escape From L.A. (the 1996 sequel to Escape From New York) -- have
shown futures where mandated niceness has crippled society. In Demolition Man,
left-wing have-a-nice-day-ism has left a high-tech future unable to deal with a
violent criminal; in Escape from
Speculative films of this decade have also cashed in on the
resurgent national mood of paranoia and general dissatisfaction with the powers
that be. From Terminator 2: Judgment Day (1991) to The Matrix (1999), many
films have opined that the world around us isn't quite what it appears to be,
or that some aspect of it is out to get us. A quieter, more intellectual effort
is 1997's Gattaca, which takes off from fears about genetic engineering.
Then there are just plain stylistic statements. The Fifth Element
(1997) brings the weird-hair-and-tunics school of sci-fi (whose valedictorian
was unquestionably
As we head into a new century, the future doesn't look bright for
speculative films. Given the state of movies in general, it doesn't appear
they're ever again going to get as consistently smart and rich as Blade Runner
or Rollerball, or as visionary as 2001. Then again, when you're talking about
the future, a bit of optimism wouldn't hurt. Even in 1936, with the world about
to go to pieces around him, H.G. Wells had enough vision to see that anything
was possible, even salvation for a world with a lousy track record.
So maybe we can hold out a bit of hope for