10 most prophetic sci fi movies

[lester1/2jr]

another one of these articles.  What about plan 9?  hello?

[ER]

It wasn't a movie, but back in the late '90's the pilot episode of FOX's The Lone Gunmen, a spinoff from The X-Files, was all about a plot to fly a commercial jetliner into the World Trade Center.

[soylentgreen]

That's actually a more well put together approach than those type of lists usually amount to.  They took the time(albeit briefly) to consider the implications of the films rather than measuring them as Jeane Dixonesque prophecy. 

Simply taking a sci-fi film out of it's contemporaneous context and applauding or dismissing it based on superficial qualities is useless (So we're not driving up and down the sides of buildings or eating each other as green cheez-its yet?  Boy were they wrong!).

Interestingly, while yes, we don't actually have folks slaughtering each other in prime-time RUNNING MAN-style just yet, that incident some years ago with the Jenny Jones says to me that it may all be a matter of equivocation.

I'm glad someone else in the universe finally addressed the rampant use of flamethrowers in post-apocalyptic societies.  Neo-dark ages don't necessarily imply impracticality.
And their less than subtle concern with 'sweaty Hestons' was hilarious. 


ps   they may have been a bit premature in dismissing the notion of replicants....


   

[ghouck]

I'm glad someone else in the universe finally addressed the rampant use of flamethrowers in post-apocalyptic societies.

I have to say though that in the capacity they are used in Road Warrior, it does make quite  a bit of sense. They don't use hoards of fuel, they are VERY effective at closer ranges across an area, they are VERY simple to build and can be constructed largely of existing parts. The amount of fuel used by the flamethrowers in RW is insignificant compared to the amount of fuel and energy required to build a rifle from scratch.

In RW, there didn't seem to be a source of new ammo, and bow-and-arrow don't work so well against vehicles. Better to burn up a bit of fuel in keeping your enemy from taking it all from you.

[RCMerchant]

The BRAIN that WOULDN'T DIE....someday...it will happen.

1940-living dog head....

http://youtube.com/watch?v=cEcUTMpyRLY
1970....Monkey head transplant...
http://youtube.com/watch?v=HwPBE7fXj4k


Hmmm....I wonder if the 1940 tape is proganda or real.

[Justy]

and bow-and-arrow don't work so well against vehicles.

It really depends on the marksmanship of the archer in question. Granted shooting a bolt or arrow at a charging deathmobile may be quite feeble. However if you are a good enough shot you may be able to exploit a weakness in the design of the vehicle, perhaps you can hit the driver or pilot, shatter or crack a window. You just need to be creative. A weapon is nothing without the skill of its user.

[Kester Pelagius]

lester1/2jr,

Just how does Plan 9 qualify as prophetic?  And if you say because it prophesied the trend in horrible low-budget movies I'm going to hit my head against the wall.   

Besides, after looking the article over, I think this guy's been cheezing.  While there's some interesting points the compiler either doesn't know sci-fi very well or is ignoring the genre to make their blunt points.  For instance. .

[RANT ON]
Videophones: These not only did NOT first appear in 2001: A Space Odyssey (I think that honor may go to Metropolis) they have been a staple of sci-fi since before it was called sci-fi.  Besides which they did and do exist (granted not commercially)- though they have been rendered obsolete by personal computer vidcams, why no mention of these?-  so saying he is "undecided" is just, well, bizarre.

Government-sanctioned suicide: Undecided, eh?  But aren't such kits already available in some European countries by prescription?  And didn't 60 minutes or 20/20 do a report on plans to distribute euthanasia kit's in the U.S. quite a few years back?   Either this guy is very uninformed or they're putting something in my drinking water.  I like that he mentions CHILDREN OF MEN, it's a nice contemporary movie reference most people will probably get.   Problem is the presence of such kits in that movie is incidental.  The movie/mini-series I'd have referenced would be the bleak remake of ON THE BEACH as suicide kits play a prominent role in that. 

Industrial cannibalism:  A miss?  So this couldn't happen eh?  I guess that means feeding renet to animals- as in mixing parts of dead animals, including their feces, into feed- doesn't happen and isn't big business; not to mention being part of the problem that leads to "downer cow" syndrome or whatever they're calling it now.  It may not be humans eating humans but when people can justify feeding animals to animals because it's making them money how long until people figure there's something far more lucrative to do with dead people than bury them. . . OH, WAIT, they've already caught people illegally selling cadavers, or parts taken from cadavers, to the medical establishment.

Iris scans:  Undecided? Called "completely feasible", which I am guessing is the author's way of saying they could theoretically exist but don't.  Problem is they do exist, as does a host of other biometric security devices; they're just not commercially mass market available yet.  Then again the same used to hold true for pregnancy tests and now you can get such kits in DOLLAR stores!!!

Jet packs:  Undecided?  Is this guy joking?  This is a total miss.  The idea for personal jet packs have existed since the first pulps and were a fad of the 70s, indeed they appeared in a host of TV shows and movies (Ark II, Million Dollar Man, &tc).  Alas they aren't feasible for a host of reasons.  Now personal anti-grav packs. .
[/RANT OFF]

Otherwise a interesting selection of futuristic movies, but hardly a definitive TOP TEN.  Why wasn't FRANKENSTEIN mentioned?  That has to be the first movie in which human transplants are referenced.  While science fiction at the time it's science fact today.  And why doesn't this list include any of Fritz Lang's movies?  That I just don't understand.

[ghouck]

It really depends on the marksmanship of the archer in question. Granted shooting a bolt or arrow at a charging deathmobile may be quite feeble. However if you are a good enough shot you may be able to exploit a weakness in the design of the vehicle, perhaps you can hit the driver or pilot, shatter or crack a window. You just need to be creative. A weapon is nothing without the skill of its user.

Yes, technically, someone could hit some weak part of a vehicle with some success, but in the context of the discussion, it's far-fetched enough to be irrelevant. If you remember, there wee dozens of vehicles in RW, requiring dozens of your lucky shots. A flamethrower is easy: Point and shoot. Hey, the fire is a little to the left of my target? OK, keep the trigger pulled and  point a little more toward the right.

I'm really not seeing any weakness on a vehicle that an arrow could exploit that a flamethrower couldn't.

You're right about a weapon being nothing without the skill of it's user, but some weapons don't really require any special skill, while other require quite a bit to be useful at all.

[Justy]

You're absolutely correct. I just did not want to totally write off the bow. It really is an underestimated weapon. I believe that Ben Franklin actually tried to suggest to the colonial leadership to adopt the bow over the musket because the wood was plentiful and they were more accurate than muskets. Anyways A flamethrower is definitely a more effective weapon in most cases. Especially if that flamethrower is based on throwing that flaming jelly.

[Dave M]

I love it in movies when a million archers all let loose a volley all at once (so it looks like it's raining arrows). I wonder how hard that is, since you don't have to aim really? Maybe they could have had all the children and old people do that, while the able bodied people manned the ramparts or whatever. Except for that one kid with the boomerang of course, he was like a Jedi with that.

[Bonehead-XL]

Very well written list. And "Destination Moon" is a total bore.

[JaseSF]

The most prophetic Sci-Fi seems to me to be simply the sci-fi that relies most heavily on real life science or on the writings of the more visionary science fiction writers which isn't all that unexpected when you really stop and think about it.

[Justy]

I really think that its difficult for any Sci Fi to be prophetic today. Back in the 40's and 50's sure. Today so many people are connected, exchanging ideas and reading the work of the others that the average Sci Fi fan of today is far more educated than his 50's contemporaries. I think that pretty much every theory has been brought into Sci Fi in one fashion or another. Robots, AI, space travel, dimensions, genetic manipulation... ho hum. We are so spoiled. Yeah you can say some authors have creative takes on things, but its hard to say where today's prophets can lead in a direction. With technology you see and project a logical progression of how it be changed and adapted, there are things that we would like to do... but those things that we want to aren't really prophetic. Larry Nivens Ringworld is an excellent piece of prophetic Sci Fi that was a far out concept, but that came out over thirty years ago. I don't consider Gattica prophetic because all those Big Brother concepts were already espoused by Orwell. The Matrix was pre-saged by Neuromancer. So any honest prophetic movies are the old ones, but even those writers were often already in scientific fields and were trading on inside information. So really the list is limited for honest prophetic movies.

[peter johnson]

This is not a film, but on David Ossman's science fiction/comedy solo albumn, "Mark Time", an astronaut from the past comes to the future & is told his government from 1972 "resigned".  This was about 3 years before Nixon actually really DID resign -- what was intended as a joke became eerily prophetic reality.  That and the history of the "Oil Wars" on the same record.  Firesign Theatre was creepily on target on so many of their predictions that you sometimes have to check the release date on the albumn to make sure they're not commenting on current events.
Check out "I Think We're All Bozos on This Bus", from 1971, and be amazed at the cloning, holography, and computer simulant realities that we're living right now . . .
peter johnson/denny not my real self

[peter johnson]

The dog head experiment is both propaganda and real --
The Soviets were big on doing all sorts of flashy stuff that had no actual application in real life.  In the late '50's/early '60's they created a string of two-headed dogs by grafting & etc.  Most of these chimeras died very quickly, as I'm certain that poor animate head did also.  They were also careful to not mention that Laika the space dog was killed by her space voyage.
There is no doubting the ingenuity of individual Russian scientists, but their talents were frequently squandered.  Read the biography of Lev Segeyevitch Termen (Theremin).  Termen invented practical television a good decade before Philo Farnsworth, but Stalin kept it a "state secret" & gave it to the Office of State Security.  Ditto a whole bunch of other stuff.  Then he was thrown into the Gulag for not being sufficiently Soviet.
peter johnson/denny crane