Classic futuristic dramas perfect for the present
The world is like a bad science-fiction movie right about now. The streets are nearly empty, making it easy to think up last-man-on-Earth scenarios. No one can say when it will end. It all feels … unreal.
All of which makes this an ideal time to take advantage of the idle hours and take a deep dive into sci-fi. Netflix has its share of futuristic cheese, but it also plays host to some bona fide classics of the genre. There’s something eerily comforting about soaking in thoughtful visions of the future while the present goes to hell in a hand basket. Here’s a taste of what I’ve been rewatching in these times of mass quarantine. The future, as they say, is now.
Every time I watch “Blade Runner” (1982), regardless of the version, I’m struck how long a shadow it casts over the genre in its wake. (Netflix is currently running the “final cut”). The hyper-vertical architecture and eye-popping digital billboards are a dime a dozen on the big screen; at this point, you’ll even find corollaries in the real word. You can no longer make a credible urban sci-fi movie without a nod to the film’s multiethnic polyglot vision of Los Angeles, 2019. (Yes, 2019).
However, like so many great sci-fi films, “Blade Runner” gets its philosophical mojo from a timeless question: What does it mean to be human? Or, more than human? It’s still hard to watch without feeling for the replicants designated for extinction, the walking, talking specimens of artificial intelligence bent on survival. You would expect nothing less from a Philip K. Dick novel. With Ridley Scott flexing his film-noir design muscles, you get so much more.
The film that best applied the lessons of “Blade Runner” also bears Dick’s fingerprints. In “Minority Report”(2002), based on Dick’s 1956 short story, the billboards don’t just beckon; they scan consumers’ retinas and call to them by name. Cars whoosh by on vertical highways, a major boon for chase scenes. Instead of replicants, the film gives us mutants, or precogs, that detect murders before they’re committed (as you might expect, crime is way down).
Like “Blade Runner,” “Minority
Report” is, at heart, a metaphysical detective story. The top precog cop (Tom Cruise) goes on the lam when the crime-fighting system he so vehemently champions fingers him for a murderto-be. Like the dystopian Netflix series “Altered Carbon,” “Minority Report” features a world in which consciousness can be downloaded. There’s a booming black market for eyeballs, for those that might need to skirt the ubiquitous retina scans.
Most pertinent, there’s an element of dystopia — citizens arrested for murders that haven’t even been committed — masquerading as progress. And yes, reality is catching up. An internet search for “Minority Report Artificial Intelligence” yields several news stories about predictive/preventive technology designed to fight crime before it happens, in countries from China and Japan to England and the U.S. (Tom Cruise not included).
One of the best sci-fi films of recent years isn’t even set in a discernible future. In “Ex Machina” (2014), a junior programmer (Domhnall Gleeson) wins a trip to the Edenic fortress of his company’s ethically challenged CEO (Oscar Isaac). The kid is assigned an intriguing task: apply the Turing Test — designed to see if a computer can think like a human being — to an alluring work of artificial intelligence named Ava (Alicia Vikander).
It’s a fine allegory of sex, power and control. And the film definitely roots for the AI. Ava — please note the biblical allusion — comes off as vulnerable, but she’s easily the sharpest tool in this shed, a step ahead of her overconfident human keepers. This, the film slyly suggests, is how the uprising of the machines will begin: with a highly evolved woman outfoxing the self-absorbed men in her wake.
Finally, we have a sci-fi film that cuts close to the here and now, and not only because the director just won an Oscar. Bong Joon-ho’s “Snowpiercer” (2013) conjures a world frozen over by a coolant shot into the atmosphere to combat global warming. The last inhabitants of Earth are confined to a train that can only circle the Earth over and over again.
Inside that train is a microcosm of the class struggle. In the back, but determined to move on up, is the working class, given the dangerous jobs and the worst food (the word “protein” has rarely been used so loosely). Up front resides the swell set, living it up on the track to nowhere.
The Atlantic recently posited that “in the coming months and years, there will really be two pandemics in America,” and two sets of victims. One will have the safety net to emerge relatively stable. The other will not fare as well. Among the differentiating factors? “Demographic predestination.”
That’s the train we’re on, and it doesn’t appear to be stopping any time soon. At least there’s plenty to watch as we go ’round.