Inspired by lucwarms’s thead.
I have trouble thinking of sci-fi movies that DON’T present a fairly bleak picture of the future.
Help me out by reminding me of some.
Anything prefaced by the words “Star” and “Trek”…they all pretty much present a peachy-keen vision of the future. And Bill and Ted’s Excellent Adventure.
Barbarella.
Well, Starship Troopers sort of has a nice society in it…as long as you aren’t in the infantry…or Buenos Aires. And I DID get the suspicious impression that the Earth government was purposely prolonging the war with the bugs in order to keep it’s own structure/economy propped up, kind of like Oceania in “1984.”
2001 A Space Odyssey. I know, not the future any more. You might also think a computer murdering its crewmates is not very positive vision of the future. However, its depiction of the enlightment of man I feel is very positive. Certainly more positive than the actual events of 2001 turned out to be.
I should have excluded the Star Trek series, in which at least the human society is relative ly benign.
I had no idea the “Bill and Ted” flick was sci-fi. I’ve never seen it.
“Back to the Future II’s” had a pretty pleasant and optimistic view of 2015 (e.g., Hill Valley’s downtown was restored and thriving, flying cars, efficient criminal justice system due to the elimination of laywers, etc.)
“Back to the Future II’s” had a pretty pleasant and optimistic view of 2015 (e.g., Hill Valley’s downtown was restored and thriving, flying cars, efficient criminal justice system due to the elimination of lawyers, etc.)
(Ignore the spelling glitch in the previous post.)
Minority Report
AI
The Truman Show
Open Your Eyes
Forbidden Planet
Demolition Man
I have to disagree strongly about Minority Report and Demolition Man; both have futures in which basic rights have been taken away.
As for The Truman Show…would you want to live in a world where that was somehow legal?
In AI, not only has the world suffered an immense ecological disaster, but we’ve created artificial beings, and then treated them with disdain and brutality. Not that happy.
On the topic of Starship Troopers, the future is a little more pleasant in the book than the movie. Though Buenos Aires still gets smashed. And the Bugs actually use weapons… that one was a nice touch they removed in the transition.
Sorry – I meant to include my own list of movies with cheerful futures, rather than just being a Mr. Grumpypants, but I honestly can’t think of one right now. I guess it’s easier to imagine all the things that can go wrong. Maybe peace, prosperity and good will just aren’t as artistically interesting as conflict, chaos and struggling.
(I meant that it was a bad thing that they took it out)
The Time Machine
By the end of the movie, anyways. People living in a paradise and their one enemy finally gone…
But, the destruction of knowledge is disturbing.
Battlefield Earth
lots of room to breathe, no more L Ron Hubbard books, John Travolta NOT dancing…
pretty good to me
Actually, looking at current events it seems that even the most pessimistic dystopian future in sci-fi movies is pretty damn optimistic. At least they presume we won’t have blown the shit out of each other in the next few years; even post-apocalyptic movies show people surviving.
grendel, I was just about to say the opposite of your post. It seems to me that every optomistic view of the future is pessimistic. Already pointed out are the flaws with the “prefect” worlds of AI, Minority Report, and Demolition Man. Logan’s Run had a pretty interesting look at “paradise,” as did Gatica, and A Brave New World. It seems every future where things are bright and shinny is just a cover to help blind people from the fact that there’s something horribly corrupt with the society and world at the core.
I can’t think of one movie where there’s a positive look at the future where there isn’t some form of infringement or destruction of human life and corruption (even in Star Trek movies [i.e. Insurrection and ST: VI, whatever that one was]).
Grendel72, even a post-apocalyptic movie is optimistic? I imagine you are not the go-to person to be the life of the party.
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And in neither case is the world presented as a “bleak vision of the future” as a result. In both, the society is presented as being generally peaceful and prosperous. The methods used to create said peace are openly criticized in Minority Report and mocked in Demolition Man, but I don’t see either as being remotely bleak.
I do. It is. But again, this is irrelevant. The world presented in the movie, Truman’s world, is presented as a peaceful, prosperous, pleasant place to live. The people who created the world are criticized for the methods used to create it, and rightly so, but the world itself as shown in the film is a rather cheerful one.
I should have specified that I was referring to Act 1. The world as shown in this part of the movie looks a lot like a suburban WASP paradise. It is hardly “a bleak vision of the future”.
Number Six: in Demolition Man, all music is Taco Bell. If that isn’t a bleak vision of the future, I don’t know what is. 