Five other movies that failed to predict the future
In 1989, the sequel to one of the greatest ever movies about time travel was released, and then itself became one of the greatest movies about time travel.
While 1988’s Back to the Future was fantastic, it was set in a world we’d already seen and lived through. Back to the Future Part 2, however, showed us the mother-flippin future and we lapped it up!
Back then, 2015 seemed like such a long way away that anything could be possible. As the years went on the film only became more and more loved… but then, something happened. As social media started to spread its wings, some bright spark realised that we were getting closer and closer to that future we had grown up watching, and dammit, hoverboards didn’t look like they’d be invented in time.
The complaints started small enough at first; one or two people re-posting the joke and getting a small grin. But then the photo-shoppers got on board and started altering dates. Suddenly you couldn’t go a week without somebody else incorrectly thinking that today was the day Marty McFly arrived, #wherearemyhoverboards?
As it built to a fever-pitch, we somehow weren’t content with accepting BTTF2 as a ripping piece of comedy/sci-fi that was simply presenting a fictional version of a future land. We started to treat the movie as a prediction, and started judging it accordingly. “Ha ha, you stupid movie. All of your flawless time-lines and multi-dimension hopping story-line and great characterisation and sense of adventure and fun are useless, because you couldn’t even predict hoverboards correctly!”
Well, allow me to pour cold water over the most over-used joke on the internet by asking, so what? What about BTTF2 makes us mark it so harshly? And what about hoverboards – cool as they are – makes it the centre of it all? Nobody complains that we don’t have flying DeLoreans. Hell, nobody complained back in 1989 that WE DIDN’T HAVE TIME TRAVEL and if you’re going to take a movie to task over its cool stuff that isn’t in real life, you’d think that’d be the first thing to pick on.
Still, the internet will be the internet, so allow me to take it to its logical conclusion by confirming the results of predictions of other past movies about the future:
* Despite what you might have thought after catching a re-run of Escape from New York – The Big Apple has NOT been walled up and converted into a prison. Equally, the President is just fine.
* 2010: The Year We Made Contact. Nnnnnnnope. 2015: The Year We Found Water Traces, maybe.
* Back to New York – I was there recently, and for anybody who watched 2012, don’t panic! The city didn’t flood nor freeze over. She’s (big) apples.
* 11 years on from Terminator 3, and Skynet still hasn’t been able to wipe out the world with a nuclear holocaust. Disappointing, really.
* Despite the dire warnings of The Omega Man, humanity thus far has avoided a plague that turns most people into zombie-like ghouls. It’s kind of a shame, because had that held up, we’d all be descendants of Charlton Heston.
I was going to end this piece with a joke about The Postman, but there’s no version of reality, past, present or future in which there exist people who have seen it.
Content courtesy of TorrentThisTV. To read more pop culture news and nostalgia visit the official website.
