Science Friction

The discomfort of predicting the future, and getting it right. Andrew Leci, felon, lauds the imagination of those who thought they knew what was going to happen in 2020.

CONFESSION TIME. AS a child, I was guilty of larceny. I wasn’t caught, but I committed the crime. I bought and paid for a single cinema ticket to watch 2001: A Space Odyssey, and then watched it two more times without paying again.

My young imagination was so captured by the 144-minute film released in 1968 and directed by the inimitable Stanley Kubrick, that I had to watch it again immediately afterwards, and then again, immediately after that. I couldn’t afford three tickets – my pocket money being commensurate with my parents’ attempts to avoid spoiling their one and only son – but I also couldn’t move from my seat after sitting through the film for the first time. I did have to hide from the cinema staff who made a cursory inspection of the establishment prior to letting the next batch of moviegoers in, but this was a simple enough task in the days before scattered, designer popcorn needed clearing away, and besides, it was a weekday, and only the evening show had more than half a dozen punters.

While I managed to avoid detection, arrest and the inevitable subsequent life of crime and tragedy, I did get into serious trouble with my parents – overshooting my scheduled release time by about seven hours. But it was the start of my fascination with science fiction, and it’s one that has not abated over the years. Who doesn’t want to imagine what life might be like in the future, and what technology might have in store for the people who put it in place and have little or no idea of its ultimate destination or effect?

I became fascinated with the year 2000, not just because of Arthur C Clarke’s original short story

The Sentinel, which Kubrick turned into such a magnificent film – the best of its genre; please don’t even try to argue – but it was so far off it was nigh on unimaginable. As for the year 2020, that was even harder to wrap my young mind around, but I did think we’d all be travelling around in flying cars and that the sum of human knowledge might not be limited to the Encyclopaedia Britannica, all volumes of which were gifted to me on my 10th birthday after my father’s relief that the salesman who knocked on our door one day was not a Jehovah’s Witness. I digress.

What would life be like in 2020? During the Cold War there were many people who didn’t even think that mankind would make it that far. If we did, though, how many products of the science fiction moviemakers’ imagination would be part of our lives? Answer: quite a few. I thought it would be quite fun to look at some of the films that were made for the year 2020, and set therein, and examine how prescient they may have been, and even how horribly wrong they managed to get it.

Mission to Mars (2000)

Set in 2020, this film suggests that Martians created mankind in their own image and are not averse to the idea of reconnecting. It’s a pretty cool scenario that would require some editing as far as Charles Darwin’s The Origin of Species is concerned, and Creationists would be appalled (which is always a good thing). Colonising Mars is more than a pipedream, however, and we’ve already landed a whole load of equipment on the planet and gathered lots of information. Unfortunately, the information suggests that it’s a pretty inhospitable place and won’t be suitable to sustain life without some serious ingenuity and/or Matt Damon (see The Martian, a film set in 2035).

Edge of Tomorrow (2014)

This film is Bill Murray’s Groundhog Day but with action, aliens, Tom Cruise and Emily Blunt. By the year 2020, aliens have taken control over most of Europe and Cruise’s character – a PR officer turned combat veteran – dies over and over again simply to wake up the previous morning at London’s Heathrow airport – which can’t be pleasant.

Made only six years ago, the film doesn’t have to look too far into the future, but it’s interesting to see the designs for the combat body suits many of the

Real Steel raised questions concerning how we might feel about the robots who will, almost certainly, serve our needs and do our bidding in the future.

actors wear, that take the ‘powered exoskeletons’ currently under development (an unnamed source in the Pentagon tells me) to a whole new level. We can probably expect to see part person / part robot in a battlefield coming to you soon.

As for the ‘aliens in Europe’ scenario; I contacted the UK’s Brexit Party for a comment, and am still waiting for a response.

Real Steel (2011)

In 2020, human boxers are replaced by robots – no bad thing really – and it’s how we feel about Atom, the mechanical hero of the piece, that informs the ongoing debate and the issues relating to artificial intelligence. The fighting bot – put together by father and son team Charlie Kenton (Hugh Jackman) and

Max Kenton (Dakota Goyo) – is designed to take punishment, but is humanised to the extent that we feel for it (him?) and wince at each blow he receives. This is partly due to the connection he has with Max, as boy bonds with nuts, bolts and circuitry in a way that he doesn’t initially do with his own father, poking at issues relating to human relationships in the not too distant future as opposed to the love affairs and engagement we already have with technology in the form of our computers and mobile devices.

Real Steel raised questions concerning how we might feel about the robots who will, almost certainly, serve our needs and do our bidding in the future, and just how far we might go in giving them personalities that will make them relatable to as well as functional. This is a theme prevalent in…

Stealth (2005)

… in which a high-tech combat plane – unmanned, so a ‘drone’ by any other name – gets hit by lightning and the damage it suffers causes it to develop its own ethical code and even an ego – I kid you not. Bereft, however, of human moral judgment (apparently there is such a thing), the ‘EDI’ kind of does its own thing without needing instructions, and creates a fair amount of havoc. There is a warning here about AI and what might happen if algorithms take on lives of their own. This was probably the most interesting aspect of a not very good film. While the EDI was bombing, the film itself followed suit.

Voyage to the Prehistoric Planet (1965)

With 55 years to look ahead, this film – cheesier than an overripe brie and hammier than a kilo of prosciutto; not quite achieving the accolade of ‘so bad it’s good’ – could be forgiven for getting a whole bunch of things horribly wrong. And it did.

The year is 2020, and various spaceships on missions get into trouble on their way to Venus. Not a lot of homework was done on this film because as we all know, the planet has a mean surface temperature of more than 450 degrees Celsius and a distinctly unpleasant atmosphere.

This doesn’t seem to bother the residents, however – a hungry-looking bunch of dinosaurs and carnivorous plants for whom human beings are tasty treats. You can guess the rest, although you’re unlikely to care. The only thing that saves this film is that it had ‘hover cars’, that then came to light in the Star Wars franchise, and are being worked on today. Perhaps this film provided some inspiration for Marty McFly’s hoverboard in Back to the Future II, a gadget that is now (almost) a reality. The only other inspiration provided by this tosh was to give some dumbass the idea for a sequel; Voyage to the Planet of Prehistoric Women.

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