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Hollywood Looks at the Millennium

One of the staples of the sci-fi movie genre has always been future fiction, including tales of time travel. And it's always fun to look at such a film from the 40s or 50s or 60s and see what people thought the next century would look like.

The biggest surprise: For all the flying cars and Mars colonies and android servants that populate those films, it doesn't appear that anybody predicted the personal computer or the Internet! However, here are some movies that did make interesting predictions about the future (all links to the Internet Movie Database unless otherwise noted):

In 2001: A Space Odyssey (1968), Stanley Kubrick predicted talking super-computers, but he (and writer Arthur C. Clarke) suggested that we'd have a commercial orbiting space station and a colony on the moon by then. The space station is Russian, and there's still nothing on Luna but a flag, a golf ball, and some leftover astronautical junk.

Another, less distinguished, film that assumes we dwellers in the third century AD would be further out in space than we are was something called Space Monster (1965), also known as Space Probe Taurus, among other names. Here's a review on a site called Stomp Tokyo, which I know you'll enjoy.

Escape From New York (1981) was set in 1997, and predicted that New York City would be a maximum-security prison (as opposed to the free-floating insane asylum that some Midwesterners think it is now). The sequel, Escape From L.A. (1996), was set in 2013, and suggested a similar fate for the Left Coast city.

Blade Runner (1982) is one of the most celebrated films of the future, envisioning a dark and noisy world in which "relicants" -- artificial humans -- must be tracked down and killed because of their superiority to human beings.

Woody Allen's Sleeper (1973) is set a bit further in the future than 2000, but many of the "futurisms" in this broad slapstick masterpiece (chosen by the AFI as one of the 100 funniest American films) sound kind of familiar here in 1999, including computerized sex and about-faces in dietary advisories.

The Time Machine (1960) was only one of many movies to predict that most of us would die in a nuclear halocaust before 2000. (For more negative scenarios, see the Classic Movies article about Doomsday Movies.) We seem to have avoided that future so far -- although we'll have to see whether or not all those Y2K-bugged computers launch the leftover Soviet missles on Jan. 1.

Then maybe some of those reverse utopia films might actually come true. Let's hope not.