SciFi movies that have/will accurately portray the future?

Scifi movies often exaggerate the future but i do think there is a kernel of truth in a lot of the films made and scifi authors at times take their predictions very seriously.

A common theme in scifi is the robot uprising and to me this has somewhat already happened, not in the way films have predicted but algorithms control much of our work flow, set housing prices and control stock markets. Right now there is someone at the helm but we could be losing our grip.

My pick would be THX1138.
The scene where thx is talking to a priest and it is a dull form of a.i reminds me of predictions of a.i being used as a shallow inexpensive form of telehealth and in education to replace teachers (neither do i think will happen).
Also the normalization and future advancements in psychiatric medicine and what we define as acceptable human faults and emotions.

Give me your pick of a film please or even just some scenes you think line up with the what we have now or what you think the world will ultimately look like in the future.

And i hope this isn't all too grim, many scifi films are set in dystopias but i would love to have cool flying cars and sexy boxy robot maids, I've very disappointed this isn't (my) reality yet.

__________________
"A person is smart. People are dumb, panicky dangerous animals and you know it. Fifteen hundred years ago everybody knew the Earth was the center of the universe. Five hundred years ago, everybody knew the Earth was flat, and fifteen minutes ago, you knew that humans were alone on this planet. Imagine what you'll know tomorrow." - Agent K.

Combination of;
The Truman Show 1998
Gattaca 1997
The Matrix 1999
Her 2013

__________________
Entertainment Log
Letterboxd profile

Aniara

Sadly, Demolition Man, which is completely absurd, but then again, so is today's society.

Really though, I would say John-Connor's Her pick is pretty spot on. That scene where he is walking around town and everyone is in their own little tech bubble, ostensibly talking to no one, while actually on their devices...I see that daily.

__________________

I'm not sure that predicted anything though. That was 2013 and people were already zombified by their phones by that point.

The beginning of Shaun of the Dead did the same thing 10 years earlier with people acting like zombies before they were already zombies.

1984 (1984)
If you've seen the movie or read the book you know about several of the key elements which are becoming the norm for today's society. In 1984 every person's movement was watched and recorded by Big Brother. Today surveillance cameras and other surveillance techniques usage is rampant. Facial recognition tech, monitoring of internet devices, data collection spying by big tech is also growing exponential into a billion dollar industry.

Mass Surveillance wiki

Researchers claim Microsoft 365 is now a fully-fledged workplace surveillance tool

Surprisingly I've never seen 1984 and should do it asap I'm assuming but this is the scene i always think of for that kind of stuff. I routinely see things advertised to me that someone thinks i have interest in.

Here's 1984 on Tubi i will be watching it tonight.
https://tubitv.com/movies/300443/1984



I really love this movie

I highly recommend checking out the 1956 version if you haven't done so. I haven't seen the 1984 remake yet, but the original has a very haunting and bleak atmosphere, the black-and-white photography being a huge part of it. The love story featured in it is touching and unbelievably heartbreaking all the same. You've also got a star-making performance from Donald Pleasance. An overlooked classic.

Good call with the video clip from Minority Report (2002), that clip with ads targeting people specifically is now much more in use than it was 21 years ago. I forgot about that scene, good movie too.

The 1956 version is real good too. Supposedly there's a newer version in the works. I don't know the status on this project? I might have also heard another movie version was being worked on?

George Orwell's 1984 Is Becoming a 5-Part Limited Series with a Twist

The other aspect about 1984 (both movie versions and the book) is how history and the media that recorded history is altered to match the correct thinking of Big Brother.

Does anybody know what's in the future? I can guess, as can script writers, but when it comes to sci-fi, we only seem to be able to label the ones that were on target a long time later. So far, no Star Wars or Wookies in our real world. Being accurate is a matter of confirmation bias, where we go back and assume that the writers were seeing the future when they were actually just taking a guess and we see the ones that got something right.

Tak recently reviewed this and reminded me of how much I loved Silent Running when I was kid. I don't know how accurate it was but it sure seems more and more plausible with each passing day.

Idiocracy (2006)

This is predicated on the idea that stuff like Star Wars is science fiction, when in fact, I think it is more along the lines of fantasy, as it doesn't adhere to any real scientific structure or thoughtful speculation. I would say the same of Star Trek, even if Star Trek predicted I-pads.

To me, films like Ex Machina, Her, and Blade Runner take a more studied look at actual possible outcomes in the future, and I would add shows like The Expanse to the list, as well. Dystopic sci-fi such as A Clockwork Orange would qualify, also.

Like Sedai said Star Wars was more along the lines of sci fantasy. While George Orwell's 1984 was taking alarming trends that had happened in the 20th century (think the rise of Nazi Germany where the state is always right) then Orwell extrapolated those ideas to the not so distant future of 1984.

We are in Idiocracy moving towards 1984. But I also don't really like invoking the 1984 comparisons since there is ironically something very Orwellian about how competing political ideologies are all trying to co-opt the supposed warnings from the book for their own purposes. Everyone living in their little silos of misinformation think the book speaks directly to them, when frequently, they are very much the problem in everything turning out this way. And that's where the Idiocracy part of the equation comes in.

This is a dicey question as we're already in the futures that many of these films attempted to predict. We're way past 2001, and we're still struggling to get back to the moon. We're past 2019 and we don't have Replicant-slave-bots.



This question probably divides into "Which movies successfully predicted the future they depicted" (e.g., if we're shown a date in on screen which is in our past, then it is no longer our future) and "Which movies are doing a good job of predicting our future past 'present year'?"



If we insist that all depiction of the future are still in our future despite predicting flying cars by the 1990s, then we run afoul of the "It hasn't really happened yet" fallacy that socialists trot out when they're presented with the failures of the 20th century.

Be Well.

Unfortunately it got overshadowed by The Terminator which came out the same year, but Runaway (1984) with Tom Selleck and Gene Simmons is damn near today's level of tech.



Michael Crichton - who wrote and directed it - knew what was coming:


Smart bullets
Robots doing menial labor
Security robots with tasers
Bomb removal robots
Flying camera drones


I love this movie anyway, but pretty cool how Crichton predicted future tech pretty accurately.

__________________
A hundred percent death proof.

Tomato Necromancy - now with Vitamin R!
https://www.movieforums.com/communit...ad.php?t=65140