The future has been a much-used topic in movies over the decades. Ever since we’ve been able to determine what the future would look like, we’ve been making a movie about it. Sadly, most of the predictions turn out to be horribly wrong. While that’s not a big deal when talking about disaster movies, it does turn out to be a pretty big downer in most other situations.
Let’s take a look at some movies that got the future horribly wrong.
Blade Runner
As much as we want the whole retro sci-fi thing to be real, there’s a lot of things in Blade Runner that don’t quite match how we’ve evolved. Blade Runner assumed that by 2019 we’d have things like colonies all over the galaxy, AI indistinguishable from real humans and flying cars. What we have is phones with 4 cameras on them.
Back to the Future
In terms of predicting the future, Back to the Future was pretty lame and we still didn’t manage to make it. Where are our hoverboards, science? Where is time travel? Heck, even self-lacing shoes aren’t a thing yet.
Mad Max
While Mad Max did get a lot of things right, like oil becoming a scarce commodity, we don’t quite yet live in a desert wasteland where people spend all their free time driving custom-made cars and shooting fire from electric guitars. We should, but we don’t.
Terminator
I think we can all be happy that humanity isn’t on the brink of extinction due to a self-aware computer program that sent a swole cyborg back in time to kill people that threaten its existence in the future. We don’t need cyborgs that look like bodybuilders anyway.
2001: A Space Odyssey
The one thing that this movie got horribly wrong is that humanity did in fact get over the 60’s aesthetic. While the technology of the movie is eerily spot-on, the way people dress and present themselves shows no evolution over a 40-year period.
The Matrix
Small caveat with this one: whether or not The Matrix predicted something right is pretty much beyond our means of proving. But until science proves me wrong, let’s all assume that we don’t live in a computer simulation while our bodies are being kept unconscious and being harvested for energy to power a robot army.
Waterworld
While it wasn’t exactly specified, this movie was set somewhere in the 2500s. That may still look like a long way off to claim they had the future wrong, but I think science has evolved to the point where we can accurately predict the human race won’t grow gills and webbed feet in the next 500 years.
