2001: A Space Odyssey, in which we have manned flights to Jupiter and pictophones 4 years ago, and the movie adaptation of
1984, which came to pass except for most of it. (There was a guy named Wilbur who lived in England in that year.)
Last night I was channel surfing and came across ** Conquest of the Planet of the Apes**, filmed in 1972 and set in 1991. It’s hard to say if it’s a prequel or a sequel to the original PotA film, but in it a space virus has killed all domesticated pets so they’ve been replaced by chimpanzees, who have been conscripted by America’s gestapo like government to do janitorial and domestic work. (Apparently the same virus made the chimps grow a lot taller, somehow forget they’re capable of beating the besheezus out of a human, and form opposable thumbs.) Wonderfully campy stuff, especially Ricardo Montalban imitating Roddy McDowall screaming “Lousy human bastards!” It does feature VCRs, however.
What are some other films whose year of setting has come to pass?
Also, the final PotA saga, Battle for the Planet of the Apes, takes place about 15 years after Conquest, by which time humanity has destroyed itself and humans and apes live in relative peace and harmony, until some misfits on both sides start throwing some shite. It would therefore take place about now.
The TV series Space:1999 was set in … wait for it … 1999. And as far as I recall, the moon was not blown out of Earth’s orbit in that year. Nor did we have a lunar base to be lost if it had.
Another TV series, Lost in Space, had the first interstellar spaceship being launched in 1997
And according to Star Trek, the Eugenics War was fought from 1992 to 1996. Remember? Khan conquered a quarter of the planet before being defeated.
The movie “12 Monkeys” is set mostly in the recent past, including an apocalypse that happens in the year 1996. In about 35 years, the entire movie will be set in the past.
The Spindrift, in Land of the Giants, left Earth in 1983.
Until the End of the World was released in 1991 (IMDb says it took 14 years to make), set in 1999. A friend of mine recommended it to me by saying it was the best near-future atmosphere he had ever seen in a movie. I saw it in 1996 and agree with him. It didn’t get all the details right, but it had a great sense of things being slightly more advanced, but not all shiny and pristine.
I don’t think 12 Monkeys counts. You can’t say 1996 “passed” 12 Monkeys by. The movie was released in 1995. They were pretty sure what 1996 would look like!
Max Ehrlich’s The Big Eye has the Earth of 1960, ummm…
nearly taken out by a stray planetoid, and as a consequence of our impending extinction, the human race stops the arms race and gives up petty squabbling
Ohyeahhhh… I remember hearing about that on CNN when I was in Jr. High. Did we win?
Judgement Day, as referenced in the Terminator Movies, happened in 1997. We have yet to catch up with the war between Man and the Machines which IIRC is in 2029.
IIRC, Predator 2 took place in 1999. I’m not sure if LA looked much different in the 1999 of the movie compared to the 1999 of real life.
There was a Dr. Who movie made in 1999, IIRC, that circled around Y2K.
Actually, I can think of a mess of movies which take place in the distopian future of 1999.
the Omega Man begins with Charlton Heston wandering around a deserted (except for the occasional mutant) Los Angeles in the far-off year of…(are you ready?) 1978!
1997 was a very bad year, not only was it the year of Judgement Day but World War III was in full chaos and the President crashed into the Maximum Security prison of New York City in Escape From New York.
I don’t think I ever saw that movie until last year, which really made me giggle.
From about the same time, the Macross Saga of Robotech started with the crash of the SDF-1 on Macross island in 1999, after several (I think 10, but one timeline is saying the war started in 1995) years of global war. The UN would have been established as the world government last year, and the first test flights of the Valkerie Veretechs will take place this year.
(Details are a little different for Macross itself, but the dates are still more or less the same.)
I totally remember being seven years old and getting very jazzed up after working out that I wouldn’t be too old in 1999. When I grew up I’d be able to go to the moon and beyond!
What a rip-off.
Not quite the same, but Battlestar Galactica was supposed to take place before Earth history started. (Pay no attention to the spin-off. It never existed.)
The Martian Chronicles began in the year 1999.
The Shape of Things to Come starts with an outbreak of world war in 1940-- close… except that it continues until the mid-sixties, when plague wipes out most of the population. This pushes our conquest of space back several decades. (Moon landing somewhere around 2040? 'Zat right?)
Edward Belamy’s novel Looking Backward, published in the 1800’s had the United States becoming a socialist utopia by 2001. Poverty, hunger and disease were eliminated, crime shrank to zero and everyone had a twenty-hour workweek. While Belamy didn’t exactly bat a hundred, he did forsee the appearance of shopping malls and credit cards.
A less kind fate was to be in store for England by 1984, according to G. K. Chesterton’s The Napoleon of Notting Hill. The neighborhoods of London have become separate political factions, constantly at war with each other. (Orwell set 1984 in 1984 as a homage to this book.)
