You really shouldn't fret about your financial future. According to the movies, you'll be so busy fighting cyborgs, repelling viruses, reducing populations and reconstructing post-apocalyptic society that you'll have no time for such frivolities as money. DONALD CLARKElooks at the future according to Hollywood
NEXT WEEK, the fourth film in The Terminatorseries clangs onto screens. Set, somewhat worryingly, just nine years in the future, it suggests that, in that short space of time, the world's computers will have come together to wage war on puny, naïve mankind. Only sweary Christian Bale, with his worried scowl and weirdly bass-heavy voice, can save the planet.
Just last month, Star Trekoffered a somewhat less pessimistic take on the way ahead for humanity. Sure, the Federation may be under attack from Romulans, but a degree of stability does exist in the cosmos and we seem to be getting on quite well with our machines. What are the movies trying to tell us about the future? Are we on the way to the stars or headed to viral-infected, post-apocalyptic hell in a flying handcart?
WILL IT BE PERFECT?
It may be because such places always seem boring in literature or simply that history tells us that there are too many losers in any social revolution, but perfect societies are rare in science fiction. A kind of Utopia is reached in the latter stages of William Cameron Menzies's timeless Things to Come(1936), an adaptation H G Wells's great speculative novel, but it is brought into question by a dispute between Luddites and those who favour progress. Despite the Star Trek films' optimism, the men, women and things of Starfleet are constantly being dragged into some miserable conflict or other.
Of course, you could argue that, for the blissfully unaware, the world of Logan's Runis a kind of paradise. Life for the thinkers in Metropolisis also fairly pleasant. Yet both societies must live with the constant awareness of different kinds of miseries just beneath or beyond them.
WHAT WILL WE WEAR?
Collarless pyjamas and monochrome jumpsuits will be enormously popular in years to come. You see such unlovely garments in Star Trek, Alien, 2001: A Space Odyssey, Silent Running, Outlandand Logan's Run. Of course, most of these films were set in space, where a class of utility wear may be the norm. On earth we will, it seems, be donning variations on the fashions prevalent when the relevant films were made.
Aliens suggest we will still wear suits, but with the back of the collar turned up. Back to the Future Part IIargues the case for two ties worn over the same busy shirt. In Blade Runnerthe characters appear to be adopting a kind of retro-retro look that acknowledges the 1980s urge to ape the 1940s. But the most spectacular example of an era projecting its fashion mores into the next century is, surely, A Clockwork Orange.Crazy flares, orange Spandex, dizzying maxi-dresses: in the future it will be 1971 forever.
TOO MANY PEOPLE?
Science fiction flicks of the 1960s and 1970s suggest that overpopulation, rather than climate change, could turn out to be our greatest challenge. If Soylent Green is to be believed, humans, deprived of adequate food resources, may turn to industrial cannibalism. Logan's Runargues that an overpopulated society will simply kill off its middle-aged. Perhaps some sort of viral pandemic — man-made or naturally occurring — will prove Sky News right and annihilate all decent people. That is the contention of T he Andromeda Strain, Twelve Monkeysand versions of Richard Matheson's I Am Legendsuch as The Omega Man, The Last Man on Earthand, yes, I Am Legend.
In recent years the changing climate has loomed over The Day After Tomorrow, Waterworld and John Hillcoat's upcoming adaptation of Cormac McCarthy's The Road. But the boss of all environmental disaster movies must be the divinely miserable Silent Running (surely a major influence on Wall-E), in which Bruce Dern tends a few remaining plants in outer space.
THE NUCLEAR OPTION?
It has not — to paraphrase Gerry Adams — gone away yet, you know. But variations on the post-nuclear apocalypse have declined in recent years. Never mind. There are plenty of gloomy older gems in which to wallow. LQ Jones's cult classic A Boy and His Dogsuggests that, following the conflagration, dogs will seem more civilised than humans (or, at least, than Don Johnson). Planet of the Apesgoes further and maintains that the apocalypse will offer our rival primates an opportunity to seize power. Stanley Kramer's On the Beach,an adaptation of Nevil Shute's bestseller, posits the terrifying prospect that humans will be forced to travel to (God help us) Australia to eke out a few more months of weary life. Still, if it turns out to be the Australia of Mad Max 2– all massive screeching trucks and wise-cracking gyrocopter pilots – then that might not be so bad.
WILL MACHINES TAKE OVER
If you are reading this on a computer then beware! Your laptop (and your phone and your food processor) are all out to get you. You don't believe me? Well, watch HAL doing awful things to the astronauts in 2001: A Space Odyssey.Cringe as Julie Christie gets molested by a malign Wall-E in Demon Seed.
The two most financially lucrative treatments of this theme — The Terminatorand The Matrixseries — offer different strategies for the machines to follow. The former argues for brute force: build giant Austrian robots, travel to the past and murder your opposition before they get a chance to organise. The latter urges the mechanised to enslave their enemies and harvest their life force. Ever spent a whole day willingly manacled to Grand Theft Auto or Halo? Well, I wouldn't laugh so hard then.
WHAT WILL WE DO FOR FUN?
If you believe A Clockwork Orange, we'll kick the heck out of tramps, drink drugged milk and listen to Beethoven. Rollerballargues that the populace will be anaesthetised by their addiction to a violent ball game. (No smart comments about rugby, Humphries.) Westworldposits theme parks that, for all their killer robots, are not so different from those of the current era.
But the unhappy truth is that, if movies are to be credited, we will be so busy fighting cyborgs, repelling viruses, dealing with unfriendly aliens, reducing surging populations and reconstructing post-apocalyptic society that we will have no time for such frivolities as games, culture, conversation or food. And you thought you were miserable now?
WILL WE BE OVER THE MOON?
Ah, the final frontier. If evidence were required that we should be cautious about predicting the future from science fiction, then the genre's dubious record on space travel should do the trick. In 1968, Stanley Kubrick and Arthur C Clarke predicted rotating space stations, journeys to Jupiter and bases on the moon. Entertainments as diverse as Flash Gordon(camp rockets), Solaris(clunky white transporters), Alien(grubby, dank intergalactic tugboats) and Forbidden Planet(classic flying saucer) have all maintained that man was destined to journey beyond the solar system. Virtually nobody predicted that, barring apocalypse, humans would, within a decade of landing on the moon, virtually give up on manned space flight. The moral? Ignore this entire article.
WHO WILL RULE?
Are we headed towards a happy society ruled, with the public's consent, by benign democratic socialists? Are we heck? Unless we are lucky enough to find ourselves in Star Trek'suniverse, we will either be buffeted by anarchy ( Mad Max, The Road, The Omega Man) or saddled with totalitarianism ( Starship Troopers, Fahrenheit 451, THX 1138).
Blame it on George Orwell. The old sage's Nineteen Eighty-Four– filmed brilliantly for the TV in 1954 and rather less impressively for cinema in, of course, 1984 – has cast a sombre light over all subsequent imaginations of the future. Terry Gilliam's magnificent Brazil, in which the totalitarian future looks very like Clement Atlee's Britain, is practically an unofficial remake.
Hang on a moment. Where were the elections in Star Trek?
