Are futuristic films ever accurate

A.� Furistic films rarely paint an entirely optimistic picture. Directors like Steven Spielberg try to deliver perfect illusions with an almost dreamlike quality.�Most authors and film-makers�conjure up a rather�miserable�future for us,�based on current problems - such as post-nuclear movies that show a civilisation wrecked by catastrophic war (Planet of the Apes) or eco-doom (The Postman). But also they take values from today's society (Death Race 2000, Rollerball, The Truman Show). They also pick themes such as overpopulation (Soylent Green), trends in crime and punishment (Escape from New York, RoboCop), or totalitarianism (1984, THX 1138).

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Q.� What was the first futuristic film

A.� The first major futuristic films were Fritz Lang's Metropolis (1926) and William Cameron Menzies, H.G Wells and Alexander Korda's Things to Come in 1936, which still attract viewers for their Art Deco machines-of-the-future and odd touches of alchemy. Lang based his city on a skyscraping New York, while Wells took his Everytown through a period of destruction as the bombs rain down, to become a techno-utopia of togas and avant-garde furniture.
Between these two films a musical called Just Imagine was released, in which citizens have numbers for names and private helicopters, but act like any other 1930 musical comedy characters. Just Imagine, along with a host of magazine and comic books published at this time, viewed the future then as fun.

In Nineteen Eighty-Four, George Orwell imagined a boiler-suited miserable future, with spy gadgets in every television and the worst of Nazi/Stalinist �oppression. This was in sharp contrast to the world of Buck Rogers in the 1950s, where everyone had a personal jet-car.

The idea of the future being fun also surfaced from Hollywood in the shape of Back to the Future II, or the holiday-on-Mars sequences in Total Recall.

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Q.� How did Kubrick view the future

A.� Clockwork Orange creator Stanley Kubrick took care to create futures so horrible no one could possibly want to live in them. Directors such as Spielberg and Ridley Scott have, in contrast, detailed so much about the future as in their films - BladeRunner or Spielberg's new film AI, that the future looks attractive to the cinema-going audience.

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Q.� Do futuristic films look out of date

A.� The dinosaurs which appeared in the 1992 film Jurassic Park seem outdated now and Kevin Kostner's Waterworld - despite using some of the most expensive special effects in the world - will probably be viewed as old-fashioned by audiences in five or 10 years from now. Kubrick used classical music that wouldn't date his films in the future. Films such as The Matrix, which was set to techno-beat, will probably amuse audiences in years to come.

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by Katharine MacColl

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