Hindustan Times ST (Mumbai) - Live
Here already?
What did science-fiction predict for 2024? In action-packed films set in this year are echoes of where we are today, and how we got here. Whistleblowers turn up dead, corporate greed costs lives. In some, pollution drives civilisation underground. There a
May you live in interesting times, goes the Chinese curse, so subtle one could mistake it for the opposite. But interesting times aren’t stable; stability is dull.
Well, we certainly live in interesting times today. How do they compare with what science-fiction predicted, for 2024? Take a look.
Quantum leap
In Beyond the Time Barrier (1960), the year 2024 looks bleak. Competitive nuclear-weapons testing has damaged Earth’s atmosphere and let in dangerous cosmic rays. The rays have rendered everyone sterile except one telepathic woman named Trirene, granddaughter of the Supreme, leader of the underground city known as the Citadel.
Everyone except the Supreme and his deputy, the Captain, is also deaf and mute.
Into this world crash-lands US Air Force pilot William Allison, who was on a sub-orbital test flight in 1960 when he zoomed through a tear in the space-time continuum. (Nearly a decade before the Moon landing, some were still clearly a little hazy on what was possible in sub-orbital flight.)
Allison is first imprisoned, then released as a vital resource, with the mission of repopulating the city. He has other plans. First, of course, he falls in love with Trirene.
Together, they frame a new mission: to help him return to his own time. There is a grand battle, a grand betrayal, a heart-breaking death and an almost-happy homegoing. Can he alter history enough to change 2024?
The (very)-low-budget sci-fi effort was directed by Edgar G Ulmer. Given today’s rising incidence of skin cancer and falling fertility rates, his low-fi effort may have had the cause wrong, but was rather on the money on at least some of the effects. As for the deaf and mute detail, he could have substituted it with blind and got that largely right too.
Bleak and bloody
The sci-fi black comedy A Boy and his Dog (1975) follows a teenager and his telepathic canine as they scramble to survive in a postapocalyptic 2024.
Wipe thoughts of Pixar and This is Us from your mind. These are neither do-or-die heroes nor even etched-in-shades-of-grey anti-heroes; they are amoral miscreants.
Eighteen-year-old Vic (played by a young Don Johnson) can’t tell right from wrong. He steals; kills; rapes women. The dog, Blood, is supremely intelligent, but suffering the quirks of imperfect genetic engineering.
As the plot unfolds, it turns out that one of Vic’s victims, a teenage girl, is from an underground settlement that has achieved some degree of stability. They need someone to help add to the gene pool.
Vic’s dream of sex with multiple women is short-lived; he is to provide his contribution through the excruciating method of electroejaculation (currently used on cattle and certain other animals, mainly endangered ones). Vic eventually escapes, but can he change? The movie was based on a wild ride of a novella, written in 1969 by fantasy author Harlan Ellison. We’ve avoided the nuclear war so feared in this time. There are Vics in our world, but they’re not unique to our time.
One thing the movie got wrong: There are no bad dogs (at most, misunderstood ones).
Infinite goop
The Highlander film series (there were six movies made between 1986 and 2007) started out strong.
Starring Christopher Lambert (as Connor MacLeod) and Sean Connery (as Juan Sánchez-Villalobos Ramírez), the first film told the story of a group of immortals and centred on MacLeod as he prepared to fight another immortal to the death.
Then came Highlander II (1991). Set in 2024, it was called one of the worst movies of all time. “If there is a planet somewhere whose civilization is based on the worst movies of all time, (this film) deserves a sacred place among their most treasured artifacts,” the film critic Roger Ebert wrote, in the Chicago Sun-Times.
To begin with, it announced that the immortals were really aliens. In its turgid plot, the ozone layer had been destroyed by industrial pollution. An electromagnetic shield invented by MacLeod, but now owned and run at immense profit by the Shield Corporation, had replaced it.
MacLeod now came upon research that indicated the ozone layer had repaired itself (as indeed it has been doing, thanks to policies that targeted chlorofluorocarbons decades ago). Shield Corporation was determined to keep this news from getting out.
Highlander II was considered so bad that part three took off from part one, ignoring it completely. But in this cheesy, action-packed, unhinged mess are echoes of where we are today, and how we got here.
Is any of it real?
The Thirteenth Floor (1999) starts out as a relatively straightforward murder mystery.
A tech billionaire named Hannon Fuller is murdered. He had been building a virtual-reality simulation called 1937 Los Angeles, populated by characters who believe they are real people. (This film was released in the same year as The Matrix, so a fairly good year for this subgenre).
Fuller’s protege and heir, Douglas Hall, also chief scientist on the project, finds a message his mentor left for him in the simulation. It indicates that his world is unreal too. It is really 1999 Los Angeles, another simulation, one of thousands.
Hall is now determined to find the people running these programs. His first step: to reach the world running his simulation, 2024 Los Angeles. He meets Jane Fuller, his mentor’s estranged daughter. She wants to tell him all about the universe of simulations, but our screens collapse into black. Make of that what you will.
Time lapse
Narcopolis (2015) is a noir time-travel thriller that starts off in 2044, before quickly shooting back to a 2024 London in which all narcotic substances have been legalised.
The recreational drugs industry is controlled, as one would expect, by big pharma. As companies peddle addictives, addicts are everywhere. A murder at the headquarters of drugs giant Ambro leads a policeman and recovering addict named Frank Grieves to a secret new drug they have been testing.
It seems to have played a role in multiple mysterious deaths and disappearances.
The drug, it turns out, lets humans travel through time, but they only survive at their destination for a few minutes, then die. The company is racing to fix the formula, but Grieves intends to expose them first. Especially after he discovers that the corpse at Ambro is his grown son Ben, come back from the future, murdered as he was about to blow the whistle. Can Grieves save himself, and his son?
As it turns out, whistleblowers, in real and fictional 2024, all too often turn up dead.