10 Sci-Fi Films That Take Place In A ‘Future’ That Has Passed

When we think about movies, and general stories, the past and the future seem more like vague, abstract concepts than tangible and fixed points in history that can never be altered (for the past) or predicted (for the future).

A story can take place literally anytime and anywhere, as it is not bound by reality. The sci-fi genre has been especially prolific in that area, trying to predict the things to come, the future itself. Many of those “futures” in movies have come and gone in the real world, occasionally bringing forth the changes these movies predicted.

10 The Island (2005)

It’s 2019; Lincoln Six Echo resides among others in an inaccessible facility. The outside world is supposedly contaminated and they are never allowed to get out; the only hope in sight is the legendary island, the place where one person gets to go every week if they win the “lottery”. Lincoln experiences flashbacks of memories that seem foreign and he visits Dr. Merrick, the leading scientist, who seems troubled about what Lincoln may be thinking.

After some suspicious events, Lincoln ends up at an off-limits part of the facility, where he discovers the truth: every person who ever went to “the Island” was actually a victim of organ harvesting. His friend, Mac, one of the technicians, reveals even more: the residents are clones owned by people in the outside world.

9 Escape From New York (1981)

We had to have John Carpenter on the list, right? It’s 1997 and for years Manhattan Island has been turned into a huge maximum-security prison, where criminals are thrown into and left to fend for themselves. Air Force 1 is highjacked and the President falls into Manhattan in an escape pod, where he is kidnapped by the Duke, the prison’s crime boss, who threatens to murder him to prevent any rescue attempts.

The Police Commissioner recruits Snake Plissken (Kurt Russell), an ex-Special Forces soldier who robbed the Federal Reserve. If Snake recovers the president, he’ll be pardoned. Snake is injected with micro-explosives to remain compliant and given 22 hours to complete his mission.

8 The Running Man (1987)

It’s 2019 and the USA has become a totalitarian police state. The Running Man is a gladiatorial game show used to pacify the masses, where prisoners are forced to run from armed mercenaries called “stalkers”. If a prisoner stays alive till the end, they win their freedom. Ben Richards (Arnold Schwarzenegger), an imprisoned and framed ex-cop, ends up in The Running Man arena, as his prison break greatly impressed the producers.

He is coerced into participating, supposedly so that his former cellmates will be spared, but then they are thrown right in there with him. A deadly hunt ensues, during which Ben kills Subzero, the first stalker to ever be killed on the show.

7 Akira (1988)

This movie was based on the homonymous manga (although it deviates from the original plot) and upon its release was the most expensive anime movie that had ever been produced. It’s 2019: thirty-one years after its destruction during WWIII, Tokyo (rebaptized ‘Neo-Tokyo’) has been reconstructed and is a prosperous megalopolis.

Shotaro Kaneda is the frontrunner of a motorcycle gang. His friend Tetsuo is wounded in a crash and moved to an undercover government location. He acquires telekinetic abilities but chooses to employ them for evil, instead of good. Those powers are identical to Akira’s, the ESPer that ruined Tokyo in 1988, and now it seems like history will recur.

6 Strange Days (1995)

This is one of Kathryn Bigelow’s less known movies, but one definitely worth the watch. It was also written and produced by James Cameron. It’s 1999 and Lenny Nero steals and sells dreams. An ex-LAPD vice cop, he peddles illegal ‘squid’ recordings made straight from the cerebral cortex of the partaker which let the onlooker feel and experience everything as if being present.

He leads a solitary, despondent existence, longing for his lovely ex-girlfriend, Faith. But Lenny’s world is crushed when he is secretly sent the recording of the vicious rape and killing of a prostitute he knew. He quickly finds himself unwillingly entangled in a shady web of death and deception.

5 The Manchurian Candidate (2004)

It’s 2008 and the presidential election is almost upon us. Years after his squadron was cornered during Operation Desert Storm, Major Ben Marco (Denzel Washington) experiences terrible recurring nightmares about experiments on him and his men and places he doesn’t remember.

He starts to question that his fellow squad member, Sergeant Raymond Shaw, today a candidate for vice-president, is the hero he -and everyone else- recalls him being. As Marco’s worries extend, Shaw’s political influence flourishes, and when Marco discovers an enigmatic implant entrenched in his back, the remembrance of what truly occurred starts to return.

4 A Scanner Darkly (2006)

This film was released in 2006 but is based on the homonymous 1977 Philip K. Dick novel with a setting in 1994. The film was shot normally with actors and then animated using the interpolated rotoscope method. America has lost the war on drugs and is now a totalitarian regime.

Undercover detective Bob Arctor is cooperating with a band of drug addicts, aiming to access the big-time suppliers of a damaging drug named Substance D. His task is endorsed by the healing center New Path Corporation, and when Bob starts to lose himself and exhibit signs of schizophrenia, he is put through tests to establish his mental situation.

3 Back To The Future Part II (1989)

In this madcap sequel, Doc Emmett Brown, Marty McFly, and Jennifer ride the time-traveling DeLorean into the future (2015 to be precise) to “tidy up” the future of the McFly family.

But Biff Tannen takes the time machine and brings to his earlier self an almanac covering the outcomes of key sporting events between 1950 and 2000, which the younger Biff exploits to accumulate a vast betting fortune and convert blissful Hill Valley into a hell-on-earth. To reinstate the present, Doc and Marty have to revisit the events of their prior venture in 1955 and recover the almanac.

2 Blade Runner (1982)

Ridley Scott’s definitive masterpiece was a loose adaptation of Philip K. Dick’s Do Androids Dream of Electric Sheep? It’s a dystopian 2019 (ok, there is a pattern here). Humans have established the technological expertise to produce replicants – humanoid robots with brief, set lifecycles. Replicants are banned on Earth but are actively and openly employed in the off-world protectorates.

In Los Angeles, California, Rick Deckard (Harrison Ford) is a former “blade runner”, a police officer whose specialty is axing replicants. He is pressed to come out of retirement when four replicants bolt from an out-world settlement and arrive on Earth.

1 2001: A Space Odyssey (1968)

Hailed as Kubrick’s frontrunner for his best sci-fi film, this masterpiece made cinematic history and received the only Oscar for Kubrick’s entire career. A daunting black construction affords a link between past and future in this perplexing film adaptation of a short story by esteemed sci-fi writer, Arthur C. Clarke.

When Dr. Dave Bowman and his team of astronauts are sent on an enigmatic quest, their spaceship’s computer, HAL, starts to exhibit progressively weirder behavior, climaxing in a nerve-wracking confrontation between humans and machines that leads to a mind-boggling journey through the time-space continuum and through experiences no man has known before.

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