It gets … worse: what can we learn from movies set in 2021?
Since the dawn of the 20th century and the mainstreaming of existential thought, every generation has fretted that they’re at the end of history, bearing witness to the hysterical collapse of social and political order. From the age of postwar nuclear anxiety to the sweet summers of the counterculture to the turn of the millennium, some faction always fears that they will be forced to let go of the world they understand to make way for a frightening, confusing new one. I would contend that the current generation of humans alive on Earth – having dealt over the past year with a global pandemic, incompetently attempted fascist takeovers, the fracturing and splintering of the world economy, and in some regions, the sky bursting into flame – has a more legitimate claim to that feeling than any that’s come before.
If the year’s final days and their promise of a vaccine rollout introduce an aftertaste of hope, the prevailing note of 2020 has been a sour apocalyptic tang. The despair, tedium, frustration and surreal delirium that defined the past 12 months have all been amply articulated in writing over the past year; today, we look to the future. Even with real life having taken on the destructive maximalism of a Roland Emmerich movie, we may still turn to films set in the year 2021 for perspectives on what previous generations imagined may await us. And from those visions, whether dystopian or utopian, perhaps we can begin to brace ourselves for a year that can’t possibly be worse than this one. Read on for a survey of cinematic soothsaying about the possible dangers waiting in the days to come:
Carnage
Simon Amstell’s BBC mockumentary lays out an entire chronology stretching from the second world war to 2067, an ambitious account that details how the UK of tomorrow will come to forsake meat and adopt an all-vegan lifestyle. The year 2021 figures prominently into this timeline, as the point at which a super swine flu descends on Britain to claim a sweeping body count. Livestock numbers plummet, pork prices skyrocket, and the populace enters an “era of confusion” about what they’re allowed to eat. At a time when the Daily Mail expects everyone to forgo pizza and chow down on toast instead, as a gesture of nationalist solidarity, food scarcity stands out as an especially troubling symptom of geopolitical unrest and viral unpreparedness. Things turn out alright in Amstell’s projections, as Britons embrace veganism and learn to live harmoniously with the animals (who have been imbued with the power of speech, in the soothing tones of Joanna Lumley). For many, however, life without the prospect of a drippy, melty cheeseburger still represents a fate worse than death.
Johnny Mnemonic
In 1995, cult oddball Robert Longo predicted that the internet would grow too large and immersive for humanity’s own good, eventually becoming so central to our daily doings that it would start to eat away at our psychology. He also envisioned the consolidation of corporate influence into a handful of mega-conglomerates, with power centralized around Asian markets. The one thing this cyberpunk seer got wrong was that we’d all look great while the world went to hell, outfitting Keanu Reeves’ human flash drive and the pharmaceutical mercenaries chasing him with immaculate, slimming suits. Aesthetics aside – virtual styles would leave the clunky, primitive CGI of Longo’s e-dimension behind – his notion of an all-consuming online existence displacing our own real-life experiences was right on the money. As younger generations contend with the blurring of the lines between their authentic selves and their outward-facing alter egos on social media, Johnny’s neural implants scrambling his consciousness start to seem redundant. A few years on Twitter can melon-ball holes in your brain just as easily.
Moon Zero Two
The august Hammer Film Productions reigned supreme during the 50s with their vividly gory revivals of such classic ghouls as Dracula, Frankenstein’s monster, and the Mummy. But the following decade saw their relevance starting to wane, and left producers scrambling to figure out what the next big thing might be. The studio tried to pivot into sci-fi and met with little success, their 1969 lunar adventure cast aside by audiences and critics alike as laughable without quite being funny. Never mind the peanut gallery over at Mystery Science Theater 3000, though; there’s some substantial truth to director Roy Ward Baker’s treatment of space exploration as a gold rush sending capitalist competitors scrambling to plant their flag. Rumors of a gigantic asteroid made of pure sapphire pit an arrogant millionaire against a daring astronaut in a race to claim it, a conflict not such a far cry from the ongoing scrum between Virgin Galactic, Northrop Grumman, and the halfdozen other business interests keen on commercializing the galaxy. Baker had the foresight to realize that incineration by extraterrestrials wouldn’t be the primary hazard when venturing into other worlds – just the rich megalomaniacs back home on Earth.
Weathering with You
Japanese animation great Makoto Shinkai didn’t look too far ahead for this fantastical environmentalism parable, which jumped forward only two years from its release in 2019. He suggests that the future is now, and that the issues raised by his script’s subtext already matter to the present moment – namely, the well-founded concern over global warming, rising water levels, and inevitable planetary drowning. Tokyo teen Hodaka can’t believe his eyes when he meets the ethereal Hina, a “sunshine girl” capable of controlling the weather at the cost of her own body’s integrity. She’s a finite natural resource, used up over the course of the film until she has no choice but to drift into the sky just to keep the rains at bay. Shinkai’s unexpected conclusion, in which Hina returns to Earth and allows the sea to swallow up much of Japan, makes the bracing proposal that maybe we’re better off that way. We’ve lived too recklessly for too long, and if our species is going to get what it deserves, all we can do is accept our self-made destiny and try to find some inner peace.
Resiklo
A land ravaged, ragtag bands of survivors, insectoid invaders, you know the drill. What sets this Philippine production apart from its genre’s many similar entries is its artistic medium of garbage, the production design guided by the in-universe plot point that manufacturing has ceased due to lack of materials and the human race has turned scavenger. Using whatever trash they can get their hands on, the rebellion must mount a jerry-rigged offensive against the “locusts” and the mutated homo sapiens in cahoots with them, while preserving the classified location of the recyclable sanctuary known as Paraiso. Their fight for freedom starts with everyone knee-deep in a problem many are still in denial about today, as expanding plastic landmasses float ominously out in the middle of the Pacific. Reality is confronting us with hard physical limits all over the place – cloud servers for data storage, the non-viability of fossil fuels – and we’ll soon have to learn how to make do with what we’ve got. Otherwise, it’s only a matter of time until we’re all subsisting on gelatin made from ground-up cockroaches, though that one comes from Snowpiercer.
Seeking a Friend of the End of the World
All of these films picture grim outcomes, but Lorene Scafaria’s feature debut is the only one that finds an optimistic way to see all the devastation. Her off-kilter comedy begins with the news that we’ve all got three weeks before a massive flaming rock obliterates our fragile blue-green marble and extinguishes all life on it. For the suicidal, middle-aged Dodge Petersen (Steve Carell), the certainty of annihilation actually jolts him out of his benumbed stupor and teaches him to appreciate the time he’s got left, which he mostly spends with the enchanting Penny Lockhart (Keira Knightley) on an end-of-days road trip. They find solace in one another, an object lesson in how to maintain sanity during an emergency that has everyone else running around like Chicken Little. Whether our oblivion comes through man-made or organic means, we’ll only have one another for light in those dark days. Some may choose to fight back, but some may concede to the whichever great cataclysm befalls us, and they might just have the right idea. Would you rather live for 50 years in austere, dangerous conditions, or spend a brief but glorious time free of regret and consequences?