Well, here we are in the future, and I must say, in a lot of
ways, it’s not what we were told to expect. Sure, we have self-driving cars,
but where are the flying cars? Yes, we have reality tv shows with contestants
who at one another’s throats but what about the ones where people are literally
out to stab each other in the back? And last of all, where are the monstrously
powerful telepaths who threaten to destroy all of Neo Tokyo? Hmm. Come to think
of it, the future that was predicted for 2019 wasn’t all that great, so maybe
it’s for the best that most of what was foretold still seems at least a little
ways off.
2019 is an auspicious year because, for whatever reason,
several science fiction films made decades ago were set in this year. There
were some utterly forgettable B-pictures like the 1983 production called 2019:
After the Fall of New York as well as a pair from 1995, one called Steel
Frontier and another called Heat Seeker. But there were also some very influential,
very good sci fi movies set in this year too.
The oldest is 1983’s immensely influential and still amazing
Blade Runner directed by Ridley Scott
and starring Harrison Ford. Set in an ecologically-devastated 2019 where actual
live animals are a thing of the past and the ultra-rich live in posh, off-world
colonies, Blade Runner’s main conflict comes from a very futuristic concern –
intelligent, powerful androids called replicants are loose and need to be
stopped by cops trained specifically to do exactly that, cops called, you
guessed it, Blade Runners. While in our own 2019, we are not strangers to urban
sprawl or climate change, thankfully Scott’s vision of our time is still just a
masterfully rendered nightmare.
Next up came a film that, at the time, was just a chunk of
1980s testosterone but now seems weirdly prescient. 1987’s The Running Man starring none other than Arnold Schwartzenegger is
a very loose adaptation of a Stephen King story in which a police officer
framed for murder ends up participating in a Hunger Games-like tv game show called The Running Man. Convicts run and are stalked by a series of
hunters with pro-wrestler-ish names like Sub-Zero and Buzzsaw. Schwartzenegger
as the framed cop, of course, manages to kill and maim his way through the
game, working his way toward clearing his name and bringing down the corrupt
totalitarian government. Actual game show host Richard Dawson is perfectly cast
as the Mephistophelean villain. It’s not a great film, but the way it predicted
our tv-addicted voyeurism and lust for unscripted drama is a little eerie.
The very next year in 1988 came the great and unsettling Akira, the animated adaptation of
Katsuhiro Otomo’s sprawling eight-years-in-the-making graphic novel of the same
name. Set in a post-apocalyptic
Neo-Tokyo, the story centers on Kaneda and Tetsuo, two friends who belong to
the same biker gang. After a freak encounter with an escaped psychic, Tetsuo
discovers he has powerful latent psychic abilities himself, and the power
slowly begins to drive him mad. Meanwhile, Kaneda simultaneously tries to save
his friend, battle rival biker gangs, and escape the various government and
police forces after him. The two-hour long film barely scratches the surface of
Otomo’s gigantic six volume book, but on its own, the film is a monument of
beautiful, elaborate hand-drawn animation and complex if violent and disturbing
storytelling. Not much in Akira resembles
our present day, but believe me, except for the super-cool motorcycles, that’s
a good thing.
So according to the movies, we are officially in the future
even if we don’t have flying cars in every driveway. Our present-day is far
from being without problems, for sure, but thankfully we do still have animals
around and no murderous robots yet that I am aware of unless you count Siri.
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