As we saw in a recent Cinema Paradiso article, the events of Ridley Scott's Blade Runner take place in November 2019, which was still 37 years hence when the film premiered on 9 September 1982. Now, of course, the setting date has been passed in real time and we are able to gauge how accurately Scott and his collaborators predicted the future. Dismayingly, they weren't far wrong about the rise of mega-corporations, while the wildfires depicted in Ron Howard's Rebuilding Paradise (2020) threaten to turn parts of California into Hades. But we are still a long way away from flying cars and undetectable androids. Mercifully, we have also been spared the majority of the disasters predicted in the prognosticatory pictures corralled in Cinema Paradiso's latest Brief History.
Cinema will be 125 years old on 28 December 2020 and its annals are stuffed with science fiction features set in an elapsed future. Hollywood was still better known for its oranges than its movies when John B. O'Brien and Christy Cabanne added five years to the calendar in The Flying Torpedo (1916), which imagines the very kind of programmable bombs that the Nazis would unleash on Britain during the latter days of the Second World War. A year after the Armistice ended the Great War, Jacques Jaccard mooted air piracy being just six years into the future in The Great Air Robbery.
But the most ambitious piece of predicative film-making in the period when sci-fi was more of an occasional curio than an established genre was William Cameron Menzie's Things to Come (1936), which drew on HG Wells's vision of a future spanning from 1940-70 and was lavishly produced by Alexander Korda in a bid to demonstrate the growing strength and ambition of the British film industry.
We all know that oft-made boast has remained a pipe dream and no one has ever been foolish enough to make a movie about Cricklewood becoming the new Hollywood. But time keeps marching on and leaves in its wake dozens of motion pictures that dared to anticipate tomorrow. Here are just a few of the passed futures that are available to rent from Cinema Paradiso.
Cold War Scenarios
Set five years in the future, Stanley Kramer's adaptation of Nevil Shute's On the Beach (1959) posits a post-apocalyptic world in which the soul survivors are the crew of the US submarine, Sawfish, and the inhabitants of Australia. According to George Pal's take on HG Wells's The Time Machine (1960), the conflagration takes place on Friday 19 August 1966. But George (Rod Taylor) doesn't linger long in this Cold War nightmare, as he has set the co-ordinates for 12 October 802701. Anyone still around to read this article on that date will be entitled to free discs for life!
With the planet still in the grip of a pandemic, any time in the future seems distant. But we can console ourselves that coronavirus is nowhere near as dangerous as the disease that turns people into vampires and leaves Vincent Price occupying the title role in Ubaldo Ragona's The Last Man on Earth (1964). This was set in 1968 and the revolutionary spirit of that year's protests was already in the air when Peter Watkins set Privilege (1967) in the early 1970s when pop singer Paul Jones spearheaded a government plan to control the minds of British youth.
Three years before Yuri Gagarin became the first man in space, Edward L. Cahn's It! The Terror From Beyond Space (1958) was envisaging regular flights to Mars. However, during a 1973 mission, Marshall Thompson finds himself sharing cabin space with a monster from the Red Planet. Doubtless, Charlton Heston would sympathise, as the Los Angeles of 1977 has become a nocturnal no-go area in Boris Segal's The Omega Man (1971), an adaptation of Richard Matheson's I Am Legend (a tome we shall be encountering again) that sees those afflicted by a biological war marauding around the streets as members of The Family.
In futuristic 1980 Dean Fredericks, the commander of the Pegasus spaceship finds himself shrunk to six inches and battling monsters in William Marshall's The Phantom Planet (1961).
According to J. Lee Thompson's Conquest of the Planet of the Apes (1972), a 1983 pandemic wipes out the Earth's cats and dogs and, by 1991, simians are the most popular pets in the police states that now make up the United States. No wonder people like Richard Benjamin and James Brolin flocked to the futuristic theme park in Michael Crichton's directorial debut, Westworld (1973), which looks a decade into the future and sees nothing but revolting robots that look like Yul Brynner.
The very concept of holidays would have been alien to the residents of the superstates of Oceania, Eurasia and East Asia in Michael Anderson's 1956 adaptation of George Orwell's 1984 and Big Brother was every bit as vigilant over the London inhabited by Winston Smith (with John Hurt taking over from Edmond O'Brien) in Michael Radford's 1984 remake. A neat reverse of numerals takes us to 1985 for scientist Zsa Zsa Gabor's bid to prevent the Venusian Queen from turning her Beta Disintegrator on Eric Fleming and his fellow space travellers in Edward Bernds's Queen of Outer Space (1958). But, while it's frustrating that this camp classic isn't currently available on disc, Cinema Paradiso users can console themselves with one more movie set in 1985, Richard T. Heffron's Futureworld (1976), which takes place two years after the Westworld scandal and follows journalists Peter Fonda and Blythe Danner to the Delos Corporation's new resort.
Although Colin Wilson's novel, The Space Vampires, was published in 1976, there's only a one-year advancement on the action in Tobe Hooper's Lifeforce (1985), as the crew of the Churchill returns from a mission to follow Halley's Comet with three humanoids aboard. The decision to release Mathilda May and her consorts from suspended animation proves to be a major mistake, however. The subsequent devastation is nothing compared to that which befalls Sheffield between 1988-2003 in Mick Jackson's Threads (1984), which was written by Barry Hines and examines the ramifications of a 200 megaton attack on Britain in a style that combines Peter Watkins's The War Game (1965) and Ken Loach's Kes (1969). Set around the same time, Nicholas Meyer's The Day After (1983) provides an equally chilling account of an apocalypse in the American Mid-West, with Jason Robards leading a strong cast in a landmark TV-movie.
A Brave New World
We're back in the realm of space vampires, as we enter the 1990s with Curtis Harrington's cult gem, Queen of Blood (1960), which sees Basil Rathbone send Dennis Hopper to Mars to recover the green-skinned Florence Marly, who is the sole survivor of a spaceship crash-landing. Big mistake, although Marly might have come in useful in restoring law and order to one of the five boroughs after the cops retreat in the face of a turf war between the Riders, the Scavengers, the Tigers and the Zombies in Enzo G. Castellari's gang-buster, The Bronx Warriors. Set a few years later, the sequel, Escape From the Bronx (both 1983) sees sadistic ex-prison warden Henry Silva move in to demolish the enclave on behalf of the General Construction Corporation.
It doesn't take a genius to guess what Michael Crichton might have been watching before he wrote and directed Runaway (1984), which is set in 1991 and stars Tom Selleck as a cop who specialises in dealing with malfunctioning robots. But you have to give credit to a picture that anticipated the Internet, social media, voice-activated computers, PC tablets, wireless headsets, domestic robots, camera drones, facial recognition and retinal identification. The same year also provides the setting for Graham Baker's Alien Nation (1988), an underrated treaties on integration that sees the LAPD duo of James Caan and Mandy Patinkin investigate the death of a fellow officer. The latter, however, is viewed with suspicion because he is one of the Newcomers who had landed in a giant spaceship in the Mojave Desert three years earlier.
In January 1994, the USS Montana sinks in mysterious circumstances in the Cayman Trough and a SEAL team is sent to the Deep Cove drilling platform to investigate. But, as James Cameron reveals in The Abyss (1989), whatever is lurking at the bottom of the sea isn't the only thing making the earth move for the rig's designer, Mary Elizabeth Mastrantonio, and her ex-husband foreman, Ed Harris. There are those who claim that George Miller's Mad Max (1979) is set also set in 1994, while Mad Max 2 (1981) takes place in 1999, Mad Max: Beyond Thunderdome (1985) moves us on to 2012 and Mad Max: Fury Road (2015) deposits us in 2018. Then again, there are others who site Stanley Kubrick's adaptation of Anthony Burgess's A Clockwork Orange (1971) in 1995. Who knows?
We roll up to 1995 in Brian Trenchard-Smith's Dead End Drive-In (1986), which mischievously screens entries from the director's own back catalogue, as Ned Manning and Natalie McCurry find themselves trapped at the Star Drive-in in his brother's classic Chevrolet. The same year will also ring bells for fans of the highest-grossing R-rated movie of all time, James Cameron's Terminator 2: Judgment Day (1991), as Sarah Connor (Linda Hamilton) receives help from an unexpected source (and in the imposing shape of Arnold Schwarzenegger) to help her stop a murderous T-1000 (Robert Patrick) from harming her son, John (Edward Furlong).
Three features took 1996 as their setting, with Mickey Rourke and Don Johnson planning to steal a consignment of a designer drug called Crystal Dream in order to prevent the Great Trust bank from closing down their beloved Rock'n'Roll Bar & Grille in Simon Wincer's biker adventure, Harley Davidson and the Marlboro Man (1991). The bulk of the action in Marco Brambila's Demolition Man (1991) takes place in 2032. But LAPD cop Sylvester Stallone and career crook Wesley Snipes are both cryogenically frozen in 1996 after an explosive hostage situation.
Completing the triptych is Terry Gilliam's Twelve Monkeys (1995), which also leaps forward to 2035 after a group known as the Army of the Twelve Monkeys supposedly releases a virus that wipes out the 99% of humankind back in 1996. Among the survivors are Bruce Willis, Brad Pitt and Madeleine Stowe in a netherworld puzzler that was expanded from Chris Marker's photo-short, La Jetée (1962), which is available from Cinema Paradiso in a double-bill with the French avant-gardist's free-form travelogue, Sans Soleil (1983).
Another double bill pairs David Cronenberg's debut, Stereo (1969), with Crimes of the Future (1970), which is set in 1997 and follows the efforts of Adrian Tripod, the owner of the House of Skin dermatological clinic, to find Antoine Rouge, the mad scientist who had identified the cosmetics-related malady that has wiped out the entire population of sexually mature women. Another search drives the action in John Carpenter's Escape From New York (1981), as former Special Forces soldier Snake Plissken (Kurt Russell) is offered a pardon if he can rescue the President of the United States (Donald Pleasence) after he jettisons from Air Force One into a Manhattan that has been a maximum security prison surrounded by a 50ft wall since crime levels hit 400% in 1988.
Another urban jungle, this time the Los Angeles of 1997, provides the backdrop for Stephen Hopkins's Predator 2 (1990), which centres on the awful alien discovery that LAPD lieutenant Danny Glover makes when mutilated bodies keep turning up on his patch. It's a case of same city, following year in David DeCoteau's Creepozoids (1987), which takes place six years after Armageddon and follows a bunch of deserters that includes Scream Queen Linnea Quigley into an underground bunker that was once the top-secret site of some decidedly dodgy genetic engineering experiments.
Which brings us to the six pictures set during the last year of the 20th century. Strange transmissions from the year 'one-nine-nine-nine' haunt priest Donald Pleasence, quantum physicist Victor Wong and others exposed to a cylinder full of sinister green liquid in a basement belonging to the Brotherhood of Sleep in John Carpenter's Prince of Darkness (1987), which formed the central part of the Apocalypse Trilogy that also included The Thing (1982) and In the Mouth of Madness (1994). Child psychologist Lisa Zane is the one being troubled by dark dreams in Rachel Talalay's Freddy's Dead: The Final Nightmare (1991), which culminates in a decisive visit to Elm Street. And there's more gory mayhem in Mark L. Lester's Class of 1999 (1990), as principal Malcolm McDowell asks robotics specialist Stacy Keach to create some android teachers to reclaim Kennedy High from its tearaway students.
Solar flares have reduced the 1999 Earth to a scorched wilderness in Paul Kyriazi's Omega Cop (1990), which centres on an American survivor compound run by Adam West that is facing a sex trafficking problem. The woman on the run in Wim Wenders's Until the End of the World (1991) is Solveig Dommartin, who encounters scientist Max von Sydow and the shady William Hurt in a cross-global pursuit that culminates in Australia as a rogue Indian satellite imperils the planet. A similar sense of millennial anxiety informs Kathryn Bigelow's Strange Days (1995), which opens on 30 December 1999 and sees Ralph Fiennes play Los Angeles street hustler Lenny Nero, whose dabbling in the stolen 'clips' dreams captured by illegal SQUID headsets places him and girlfriend Juliette Lewis in countdown jeopardy.
Y2K and All That
Two decades into the 21st century, it's hard to remember the consternation caused by the prospect of the imminent millennium. It started 25 years before the event, as Paul Bartel's Death Race 2000 (1975) imagined a brave new world in which life was held so cheap that the totalitarian regime ruling America, in the wake of the 1979 crash, allows drivers David Carradine and Sylvester Stallone to gain points by killing bystanders during the Transcontinental Road Race. It's a post-apocalyptic planet that cult director Richard Stanley envisages in Hardware (1990), which features cameos from singers Lemmy, Iggy Pop and Carl McCoy, as a MARK 13 cyborg reanimates itself and embarks upon a killing spree that can only be stopped by ex-soldier Dylan McDermott.
The turn of the century provides the starting point for the Snake Plissken story that sprawls over 13 years in John Carpenter's Escape From LA (1996). An earthquake on 23 August 2000 floods the San Fernando Valley and turns Los Angeles into the island on which theocratic president Cliff Robertson's daughter seeks sanctuary after stealing a weapon-disarming device known as the 'Sword of Damocles'. The time span is even more dramatic in Stanley Kubrick's 2001: A Space Odyssey (1968), an adaptation of Arthur C. Clarke's The Sentinel, which opens with the Dawn of Man before leaping through the millennia to join astronaut Dave Bowman (Keir Dullea) and the HAL9000 computer (voiced by Douglas Rain) aboard the Discovery One spacecraft heading towards Jupiter.
Every Japanese manga fan knows the date 7 April 2003, as it's the birthday of the Mighty Atom created by artist Osamu Tezuka. An android fashioned by Umataro Tenma following the death of his own son, Astro Boy is rescued by Dr Elefun and seven of his animated escapades can be found on Greatest Astro Adventures (1980). Dark Horse Comics provided the source for Peter Hyams's Timecop (1994), which is set in a 2004 in which time travel has become the norm. However, the Time Enforcement Commission frowns upon the misuse of the technology and, in travelling back to 1929 to prevent his ex-partner from cashing in on the Wall Street Crash, TEC agent Jean-Claude Van Damme stumbles across the nefarious plans of crooked politician Ron Silver.
A 2005 fight to the death between Optimus Prime and Megatron sets the scene on Cybertron in Nelson Shin's animation, Transformers: The Movie (1986), which continues the clash between the Autobots and the Decepticons. The Three Laws of Robotics devised by Isaac Asimov prove crucial to Chris Columbus's Bicentennial Man (1999), which opens with an NDR robot named Andrew (Robin Williams) going into service with Richard Martin (Sam Neill) and his family on 3 April 2005. The same year also sees John Connor (Nick Stahl) ally with his old nemesis (Arnold Schwarzenegger) to vanquish the ruthless T-X (Kristanna Loken) in Jonathan Mostow's Terminator 3: Rise of the Machines (2003).
A familiar face from the Terminator franchise resurfaces in James Yukich's Double Dragon (1994), as Robert Patrick searches a 2007 New Angeles ravaged by earthquakes, tidal waves and gang warfare to find the two halves of a talisman that would give him unprecedented mystical powers. Fortunately, Alyssa Milano's Power Corps is on hand to uphold the law, while Uma Thurman provides reverse engineer Ben Affleck with the assistance he needs to fill in the gaps in his short-term memory in John Woo's Paycheck (2003), which was adapted from a 1953 short story by Philip K. Dick, whose story, 'Do Androids Dream of Electric Sheep?' had provided the inspiration for Blade Runner.
Things were much busier in 2008, which provides the setting for five movies. Having memorably played replicant Roy Batty in Blade Runner, Rutger Hauer shows up again in Tony Maylam's Split Second (1992), as a London cop searching for kidnapped girlfriend Kim Cattrall and a DNA-absorbing serial killer in a heavily flooded London. It's snow that makes things difficult for President Kevin Pollak in Rod Lurie's Deterrence (1999), as he is trapped in a Colorado diner on the campaign trail while Iraq is threatening to start a nuclear conflagration.
We just drop into 2008 in James Isaac's Jason X (2002) to see Jason Voorhees being arrested by the US government and cryogenically frozen before the action scoots on to a training mission in outer space in 2455. There's a similar lurch in Rob Bowman's Reign of Fire (2002), which opens in 2008 as dragons are discovered during a London tunnelling project before moving on to 2020 to witness the efforts of fire chief Christian Bale and American maverick Matthew McConaughey to vanquish them. And we're back on the election trail, as Liev Schreiber seeks the vice-presidential nomination in Jonathan Demme's The Manchurian Candidate (2004), a remake of John Frankenheimer's 1962 thriller about a corporate assassination conspiracy.
Moving into 2009, Robert Sheckley's novel, Immortality Inc., provides the inspiration for Geoff Murphy's Freejack (1991), which sees bonejacker Mick Jagger whisk racing driver Emilio Estevez into the future so he can provide deceased fat cat Anthony Hopkins with a body for his computer-backed personality. Another host corpse threatens to cause chaos in Peter Svatek's Sci-Fighters (1996), as Boston cop Roddy Piper seeks out Billy Drago, the onetime partner who murdered his wife before being sent to the Moon, where he has picked up a deadly virus that will further decimate a planet already covered by a dust cloud following an ecological disaster. Fortunately, military virologist Will Smith is immune to the contagion that has wiped out humanity, but he is being watched by roaming mutants as he searches for an antidote in Francis Lawrence's take on Richard Matheson's aforementioned, I Am Legend (2007).
Days of Future Past
Despite the Cold War tensions (which, of course, had ended in reality a decade earlier), a joint-US/USSR mission blasts off in the Leonov spaceship to find out what happened to the Discovery in Peter Hyams's 2010 (1984), which draws on Arthur C. Clarke's novel, 2010: Odyssey Two, for its reunion with the HAL 9000 computer. The malevolence is purely human in Pierre Morel's District 13 (2004), a Luc Besson-produced actioner that posits as lawless Parisian banlieue that has been walled off to isolate its two million inhabitants. However, gangbuster David Belle is far from intimidated when he ventures on to the turf ruled by the merciless Larbi Naceri to find his kidnapped girlfriend.
Targetting the villainous Derek Jacobi, Christopher Eccleston finds himself on a similar mission in post-apocalyptic Liverpool in Alex Cox's Revengers Tragedy (2002), which boldly re-imagines Thomas Middleton's 1607 play. In an alternative 2011, a pathogenic virus wipes out all but 1% of the human population at the start of Karyn Kusama's Æon Flux (2005), which relocates to 2415 and the walled refuge of Bregna to show how rebel Charlize Theron seeks to undermine the rigidly perfect society.
Seemingly nobody fancied taking a stab at depicting a future 2014, but 2012 was clearly a much more attractive proposition. Plague and ecological folly have reduced New York to bleak anarchy in Robert Clouse's The Ultimate Warrior (1975). So, commune leader Max von Sydow understandably wants Yul Brynner to guide daughter Joanna Miles and botanist Richard Kelton to the island off the North Carolina coast that is trying to rebuild civilisation. Another perilous journey sees the action switch to the Planet Axturiax from an Earth in which the gorgeous have subjugated the grotesque in Álex de la Iglesia's gleefully provocative sci-fi satire, Acción Mutante (1993).
A Japanese doctor assumes an alter ego to use the DC Mini to view the dreams of patients in Satoshi Kon's celebrated anime, Paprika (2006). In the wrong hands, however, the device could have dangerous effects and the therapist has to join forces with a troubled detective in order to save the day. In the 2012 in which Jason Statham lives, private prisons mop up the crooks operating in the wake of a financial crash. However, he spots a chance to secure his freedom when Terminal Island Penitentiary warden Joan Allen organises an ultra-violent motor extravaganza in Paul W.S. Anderson's Death Race (2008), which he considers to be a prequel to the original Death Race 2000.
The discovery of a golden cross in a Pre-Columbian temple sparks the action in Nick Everhart's 2012: Doomsday (2008), which spells danger for those venturing into the jungle, as 21 December 2012 represents the end of days for the various Mayan cultures. The Mesoamerican Long Count calendar also plays a pivotal part in Roland Emmerich's 2012 (2009) as polar shifts caused by solar flares prompt the superpowers to build nine arks, each capable of carryiing 100,000 people. But will there be room geologist Chiwetel Ejiofor and novelist John Cusack (whose son just happens to be called Noah) ?
A year on and the planet looks in an even bigger mess in Kevin Costner's The Postman (1997), an adaptation of a David Brin novel that sees the director play a nomad with a knowledge of Shakespeare resist the efforts to draft him into the neo-fascist militia group known as the Holnists, whose commander, General Bethlehem (Will Patton), is determined to maintain law and order at any cost. Philip K. Dick was the brains behind Richard Linklater's A Scanner Darkly (2006), a rotoscoped saga set in 2013 that lures Keanu Reeves, Winona Ryder, Robert Downey, Jr. and Prince into a world in which everyone is strung out on Substance D and the American government is quite prepared to sacrifice the weak in order to protect the strong. The French authorities remain similarly unconcerned about the fate of the marginalised, as the parkour duo of David Belle and Cyril Raffaelli take on another band of desperados in Patrick Alessandrin's sequel, District 13 Ultimatum (2009), which was again written and produced by Luc Besson.
An old favourite pops up among the quartet sharing 2015 as its setting, as Robert Zemeckis's Back to the Future Part II (1989) sees Marty McFly (Michael J. Fox) and Doc (Christopher Lloyd) accidentally tinker with time so that Biff Tanner (Thomas F. Wilson) becomes Marty's dad in 2015. So, the duo have to zip back to the Hill Valley of 1953 in order to leave 1985 in proper working order. Got that - because it's an exercise in A-B linearity compared to the twisting convolutions crammed into Allan A. Goldstein's Memory Run (aka Synapse, 1995), an adaptation of Jean Marie Stine's 1968 novel, Season of the Witch, that sees the Life Corporation unlock the mystery of immortality. However, when murder victim Karen Duffy receives the brain of guinea pig Chris Makepeace, she runs into the Union rebels who are roaming Los Angeles in a bid to expose the truth about Life's motives.
There's more corporate malpractice on display in Roger Spottiswoode's The 6th Day (2000) as decorated fighter pilot Arnold Schwarzenegger gets home to discover that his perfect life has been stolen by an illegal clone manufactured by Replacement Technologies. Getting to confront billionaire owner Tony Goldwyn proves something of a problem, however, as he is well protected by the ruthless Michael Rooker. Might has also become right in the dystopic London of Mo Ali's Shank (2010), in which a low-key gang known as The Paper Chaserz seeks to steer clear of a vicious rival outfit dubbed The Soldiers.
The contrast between the two pictures set in 2016 couldn't be much starker. In Jay Lee's Zombie Strippers (2007), the United States is in George W. Bush's fourth term in the White House and needs so many troops to fight the dozens of wars he's caused that Marines are being reanimated to keep boots on the ground. However, a soldier infected with the top-secret virus goes on the lam and turns stripper Jenna Jameson into a ravenous revenant. Not that Rhino club owner Robert Englund seems to mind, although Bruce Wayne (Christian Bale) clearly has more of a conscience, as Batman has not been seen in the eight years since he took responsibility for the death of DA Harvey 'Two-Face' Dent (Aaron Eckhart) in Christopher Nolan's The Dark Knight (2008). But the appearance in Gotham City of Catwoman (Anne Hathaway) and Bane (Tom Hardy) persuades the reclusive millionaire to resume the guise of the Caped Crusader in the same director's The Dark Knight Rises (2012).
Feels Like Yesterday
Entering 2017, business executive David Andrews decides to risk crossing the Zone in his post-apocalyptic US town when his Gynoid wife suffers a malfunction during coitus on a wet kitchen floor. However, in order to find a replacement, he requires the assistance of the very real Melanie Griffith in Steve De Jarnatt's Michael Almereyda-scripted fantasy, Cherry 2000 (1987). The alternative America depicted in Stuart Gordon's Fortress (1992) has an overpopulation problem and Christopher Lambert is fitted with an intestinator shock device after he is incarcerated in a 26-storey underground maximum security prison for having dared to have a second child following the death of his daughter.
A Second American Civil War has broken out in the 2017 of David Hogan's Barb Wire (1996), which sees Pamela Anderson double as the owner of the Hammerhead club in the neutral city of Steel Harbor and as a gun-toting bounty hunter. Not that it did the former Baywatch (1989-2001) belle much good, however, as she won the Golden Raspberry for Worst New Star. No stranger to the Razzies, Adam Sandler plays an impatient workaholic and reluctant family man in Frank Coraci's Click (2006), who hops his way to a 2017 in which Michael Jackson is still alive after accepting a universal remote control from the eccentric Christopher Walken.
The world has become so dangerous in Jonathan Mostow's Surrogates (2009) that people live viscerally through replicants. But, when the student son of the inventor of the androids (James Cromwell) perishes when his stand-in is destroyed at the Fort Point club in Boston, FBI agent Bruce Willis has to risk re-entering reality in order to solve the crime. Doubtless Kyle Reese (Jai Courtney) wishes it was possible to work from home in Alan Taylor's Terminator Genisys (2015), as he is sent on a merry dance from 2029 in order to protect 1984 Sarah Connor (Emilia Clarke) from the evil Skynet group. At one point, Kyle and Sarah land in the San Francisco of 2017, where they encounter John Connor (Jason Clarke) and a reprogrammed Model 101/T-800 named Pops (Arnold Schwarzenegger).
In the 2018 of Norman Jewison's Rollerball (1975), wars have been outlawed and there is a worldwide obsession with a sport played by teams of rollerskaters, catchers and bikers. Houston's James Caan is the game's global superstar. But Energy Corporation boss John Houseman wants him to retire during a special TV tribute and promises to make life distinctly uncomfortable if he refuses. Caan might have listened had he known what was going on in Timo Vuorensola's Iron Sky (2012), which sees New York come under attack from the Nazis who had been busy since the Second World War building the Fourth Reich on the Moon.
Moreover, they have been biding their time to conquer the United States ruled over by President Stephanie Paul, who bears an unsubtle resemblance to the once-notorious Vice-Presidential candidate, Sarah Palin.
Detroit steps in for the Paris projects in Camille Delamarre's Brick Mansions (2014), a remake of District 13 that is set in 2018 and sees parkour pioneer David Belle reprise his role as the ex-convict Lino, while Paul Walker (in his penultimate picture) is the undercover cop struggling to keep order in a hood controlled by drug baron Tremaine Alexander, who is played by the Wu-Tang Clan's RZA. Despite Luc Besson writing and co-producing, this wasn't a hit, despite being released just five months after Walker's tragic death. Consequently, unlike its French counterpart, there hasn't been an American sequel.
Viewed from a distance of 36 years, 2019 looked a desolate and dangerous place. In Italian Enzo G. Castellari's The New Barbarians, a nuclear holocaust has left the starving survivors at the mercy of a pitiless gang known as The Templars. But help is at hand in the form of the nomadic warrior Scorpion (Giancarlo Prete) and the grenade-firing archer, Nadir (Fred Williamson). Compatriot Sergio Martino paints an equally bleak picture in 2019: After the Fall of New York (both 1983), as the President of the Pan-American Confederacy (Edward Purdom) sends Parsifal (Michael Sopkiw) into the ruined metropolis to rescue America's last fertile female (Valentine Monnier) from the mutants and lethal Euracs who seek to control the post-apocalyptic planet.
It's no accident that these films were made within a year of Blade Runner, but the picture's influence remained strong throughout the decade. There's certainly a familiar feel to the dystopia depicted in Paul Michael Glaser's The Running Man (1987), which was based on a novel written by Stephen King under his Richard Bachman pseudonym. The action takes place two years after the 2017 economic collapse that had resulted in the United States becoming a totalitarian state and pitches Arnold Schwarzenegger into a TV show that pits runners and stalkers in a fight to the death. The techno-noir fetishism is also readily evident in Katsuhiro Otomo's game-changing anime, Akira (1988), which is set in Neo-Tokyo in the aftermath of the Third World War and focuses on the potentially lethal telekinetic powers acquired by biker gang leader Shotaro Kaneda's childhood friend, Tetsuo Shima.
Billed as 'Mad Max versus the Man With No Name', Jacobsen Hart and Paul Volk's Steel Frontier (1995) is a futuristic spaghetti Western that sees lone motorbiking gunslinger Joe Lara attempt to deliver the town of New Hope from a band of marauders named the United Regime, who are led by onetime Blade Runner replicant, Brion James. The contamination that keeps unknowing clones Lincoln Six Echo (Ewen McGregor) and Jordan Two Delta (Scarlett Johansson) cooped up in remote compound in Michael Bay's The Island (2005) turns out to be a scare tactic. But that's nothing compared to the revelation about the weekly lottery that supposedly entitles one lucky resident to relocate to a fabulous island.
The plague is all too real in Michael and Peter Spierig's Daybreakers (2009) and it has turned the vast majority of the world's population into vampires. Human blood has become a prized commodity and scientists Ethan Hawke and Sam Neill are researching a substitute for the Bromley Marks chemical company when they encounter Willem Dafoe, a nosferatu who reverted after falling into a river after catching fire in sunlight. A pall hangs over the wasteland left after the extinction event that turned survivors into ravenous cannibals in John Hillcoat's adapation of Cormac McCarthy's Pulitzer-winning bestseller, The Road (2009). But, even though he is down to his last bullet, Viggo Mortensen is determined to protect son Kodi Smit-McPhee from all eventualities.
Finally, we come up to date and the numerically symmetrical year that has been the setting for 11 futuristic offerings. The earliest is Curtis Harrington's Voyage to the Prehistoric Planet (1965), which is a Roger Corman-produced variation on Pavel Klushantsev's Soviet saga, Planet of Storms (1962). In addition to adding new scenes with Basil Rathbone and Faith Domergue, Harrington also supervised the dubbing of the existing footage, which chronicled a mission from a Moon colony to a Venus that has been overrun by reptilian critters. Harrington was so unhappy with the results, however, that he used the name John Sebastian on the credits, in homage to the composer, JS Bach.
While the comic elements of this cut'n'paste job were largely accidental, they are a key component of Hiroyuki Kitakubo's Roujin Z (1991), a landmark anime that follows the trial of the nuclear-powered Z-001 hospital bed that is supposed to minister to the patient's every need. As nurse Haruko discovers, however, the prototype's shortcomings have been exposed by 87 year-old widower, Kijuro Takazawa. Luckily, there are no technical snafus during the launch of Mars I in Brian De Palma's Mission to Mars (2000). However, problems begin to mount after Don Cheadle touches down on the Red Planet and Tim Robbins is forced to lead a recovery mission - and all to the accompaniment of a typically wonderful score by Ennio Morricone.
Clearly the crew of the Ares spacecraft knew nothing about these expeditions, as they also claim to be the Martian pioneers in Maria Lidóri's Stranded (2001). However, commander Vincent Gallo and doctor Maria de Medeiros prove just as unfortunate, as they have to decide which members of the seven-strong team have to be culled for the others to stand a chance of surviving the 26-month wait for help. The scene shifts to Inner City on a unified Korean peninsula in Jeon Yun-su's Yesterday (2002), as a celebrity profiler joins forces with an overworked police force to end the 30-year reign of terror of a serial killer known as Goliath.
The role of 2020 is small but significant in Alex Proyas's I, Robot (2004), as it was the year in which Dr Alfred Lanning (James Cromwell) launched US Robotics, However, the core action of this Asimov-inspired thriller is 2035, when the founder falls to his death in mysterious circumstances and Chicago cop Del Spooner (Will Smith) is sent to investigate. A time shift sees Alan Tracy (Brady Corbet) save his family from The Hood (Ben Kinglsey) in the 2020 of Jonathan Frakes's live-action adventure, Thunderbirds (2004). But FAB aficionados will know that Gerry and Sylvia Anderson set their Supermarionation series, Thunderbirds (1965-66), in 2065, which was also the ballpark time frame for David Lane's spin-off features, Thunderbirds Are GO (1966) and Thunderbird 6 (1968).
Arriving on the big screen via a Twilight Zone episode, Shawn Levy's Real Steel (2011) draws on a Richard Matheson short story for its account of how washed-up pugilist-turned-promoter Hugh Jackman enters the 2020 world of robot boxing with estranged son Dakota Goyo in a bid to turn sparring model Atom into a worthy opponent for the undefeated world champion, Twin Cities. The robots in Guillermo Del Toro's Pacific Rim (2013) are known as Jaegers and siblings Charlie Hunnam and Diego Klattenhoff head for Anchorage in Gypsy Danger to defend Alaska against Knifehead, a Category 3 example of the Kaiju monsters that had first emerged seven years earlier when the interdimensional portal known as The Breach had opened up in the bed of the Pacific Ocean.
Aliens provide the adversaries in our final two features, with Doug Liman's Edge of Tomorrow (2014) being adapted by Hiroshi Sakurazaka's Japanese light novel, All You Need Is Kill. Being dissolved in the blood of a blue Mimic proves to have no lasting effect on Tom Cruise when he is caught up in J-Squad's disastrous bid to rout the extraterrestrials marauding across Europe. Instead, he repeatedly jolts out of sleep at Heathrow Airport while awaiting a United Defense Force flight to the continent and, consequently, he and sergeant Emily Blunt are able to develop the combat skills they need to conquer the implacable foe. However, as the mother of three children, Blunt discovers that sign language is the most effective way to confound the sightless monsters devouring anything that makes a noise in John Krasinski's A Quiet Place (2018). No explanation is given for this 2020 invasion, which makes it all the more unsettling and all the more relevant to our own troubled times.
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