How Hollywood predicted the future

The surprise ending has long been one of cinema’s most unsettling tricks, but 2016 was the year reality joined in. Regardless of whether you thought Brexit and the election of Donald Trump were good things, or each the real-world equivalent of a mysterious box that turns out to have Gwyneth Paltrow’s head inside, they certainly registered like shocks to the system.

Perhaps if the pollsters had spent a little more time at the cinema, they would have been less taken aback. The US Presidential election took place in early November, but if you visited the multiplex this summer, you’d have noticed that by mid-June, the air was already soupy with the smell of Trump.

Independence Day: Resurgence attempted to whip up the kind of chin-jutting jingoism rarely seen on screen since the Nineties, in much the same manner as the US President-elect (who in one pronouncement even seemed to ape the structure and cadence of a speech given by Bill Pullman’s president in the original Independence Day film). Then there was Suicide Squad, the DC Comics adaptation and Hollywood’s first alt-right blockbuster, which made heroes of a rag-tag gang of smirking deplorables who outmanoeuvre a conspiracy-racked establishment.

And let’s not forget the backlash to the Ghostbusters reboot, which was guilty of the liberal-elitist crimes of casting four women in its lead roles and playing up the attractiveness of their male sidekick. Paul Feig’s film – one of only a handful of worthwhile blockbusters in the longest and stupidest summer season I’ve ever covered – was met with a barrage of noise and misinformation from its detractors that now looks like a warm-up for the big post-truth show. The protest was about cynical reboots rather than women… but it just happened to single out a female-led film over countless alternative targets, and led to its cast being bombarded with graphic, sexually explicit and (in the case of breakout star Leslie Jones) racist abuse.

Anyone who complained that feminism had taken over Hollywood must have missed the sequence in Suicide Squad in which Ben Affleck’s Batman punches unconscious the croptopped female villain Harley Quinn, loads her body into the Batmobile, then gives her rough mouth-to-mouth, only for her to come around, kiss him back and laugh with delight – because, well, she must have wanted it really. As Trump himself almost said: when you’re Batman, they let you do it. You can do anything.

If this all sounds as cheerful as a shipwreck, let’s now note that 2016 was a tremendous year for film, and some of the very best releases were fired by the same political turmoil as the worst. Back in

When corrupt cartoon characters and sexist superheroes invaded our screens, Robbie Collin knew trouble was brewing