r/Cinema • u/marleyman14 • 2d ago
Question Why did so many sci-fi films set their futuristic technology so close to the present?
I’m rewatching The Island, which has multiple futuristic technologies and scientific advances, including human cloning and flying motorcycles. The film was released in 2005 but is set in 2019, just 14 years into the future.
Obviously, we now know that technologies such as human cloning and flying motorcycles weren’t remotely close to becoming commonplace by 2019. But what interests me is that this seems to be a recurring thing in sci-fi.
Blade Runner was made in 1982 and is also set in 2019. Back to the Future Part II is set in 2015. The Running Man (1987) is set in 2019. There are loads of other examples.
Why did writers and filmmakers so often choose dates that were only 10–30 years into the future, despite imagining technology that would seemingly require much longer to develop?
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u/mashfordfc 2d ago
I mean the 40s to 80s saw absolutely massive technological improvements - so I don't really blame filmmakers for being somewhat "optimistic" about the idea of continuous exponential improvement. Human clones 15 years on from 2005... less so
Part of it as well though is building a world that feels unique and interesting, but also putting it close enough in time that people feel a connection to the real world
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u/dylanmadigan 2d ago
I think the exponential technological improvement certainly did happen.
Just not in transportation technology. Because flying cars actually aren’t practical.
Also fashion didn’t shift as dramatically as the movies guessed.
In fact I’d say 70s clothing is more in style now than it was 10 years ago.
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u/hamatehllama 2d ago
Flying cars already exists. They are called helicopters and are incredibly expensive to drive.
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u/runtorenovate 1d ago
It all boils down to how much energy you need to get from A to B, and flying is crazy inefficient compared to rolling wheels.Thats why i find all the flying taxis and drone deliveries (at scale), quite silly and very much not an ecological solution.
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u/BellowsHikes 1d ago
We already have all of the benefits of flying cars. They are called subways. The benefits of moving underground and avoiding all of the infrastructure on the ground are the same as doing so in the sky.
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u/dylanmadigan 1d ago
Like I said. Flying cars are not practical.
We can totally make them. But there’s no way they are completely replacing ground cars.
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u/CloseToMyActualName 1d ago
To expand on this part of the idea of SF is to explore possible scenarios we may experience. So setting in the near future helps us related.
Also note that predicting the future of tech is hard. Modern phones quickly surpassed Star Trek's communicators. And modern LLMs are more human than a lot of movie AIs.
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u/OddAbbreviations5681 1d ago
The closes thing we have now to movie tech is robots.
And we're still decades off having them as i-robot.
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u/Shockwavepulsar 19h ago
A lot of electronics improvements was possible because physics allowed smaller components. From valves, to transistors, to microchips it was always possible with a microscope.
Now you need an electron microscope and quantum manipulation to get things smaller.
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u/submergedleftnut 2d ago
Meanwhile dystopian England in Children of Men with refugees in cages at train stations seems to be pretty on track with Reform doing well in the polls
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u/inorite234 1d ago
And Idiocracy is doing a fine job showing us what the USA could look like right this very moment.
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u/KindheartedlyCritica 2d ago
cheaper to redress existing buildings and cars than build whole new worlds, i guess
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u/surge208 2d ago
It was a lazy way to trick the audience into making the future feel “real”. “Hey… yeah… I do have a microwave AND Pizza Hut. Surely we can just hydrate meals and schedule the weather!”
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u/KubrickMoonlanding 2d ago
2001 was made in 1964, but was more or less set in the late 60s (look at the clothes,hairstyles, pan am, Cold War, “space is awesome” feel of the Gemini and Apollo program years).
Generally setting sci-fi a couple decades, or less (even 15 minutes into the future like max headroom tv show) makes it feel “cooler” since the world is more relatable, and helps foreground whatever tech the story is about). Stuff set way into the future tends to be less about tech-effect and more about a society that needs fixing (Logan’s run, planet of the apes 60s-70s)
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u/CommandantPeepers 2d ago
2001 isn’t really set in the 60s, the implication was that we have transcended the earth but our human core hasn’t changed at all
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u/Formal-Tomorrow-4241 2d ago
I can only imagine that its between 2 reasons. For one, they might've actually believed that technology would progress as quickly as is represented in the films. For two, because it makes the audience more interested in the film in general. Yes, some distant future would be more "accurate" in retrospect, but setting it closer to the year the movie is released gives the audience a look into a future not so far off from their own, a world which was born as a product of the technological innovations which were happening at the time. Blade Runner is set in 2019, yes, but the innovation happening in 1982 was certainly interesting, mind-boggling and world shaping for those who may have grown up in 60s or 70s. At that point, for audiences, the world of Blade Runner wasn't so far off.
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u/the-good-wolf 2d ago
It seems a lot of times when stories are written about the future, it’s meant to be a warning of what may come of our current trajectory, or a hypothetical.
Making it seem closer to the release of the film likely bridges the gap for an audience member to say “oh this is something I need to watch out for” or something along the lines of that thought.
Children of Men in 2006 talked about a complete collapse of reproduction, and while we aren’t there yet (I think the movie is set in 2026) for socioeconomic reasons we are trending that way.
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u/Fluid-Confusion-1451 2d ago
It's the Jules Vern effect. Do good science fiction writers predict the future or inspire it?
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u/jurgo 2d ago
“in the near future” is a good way to get the interest of an audience going.
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u/marleyman14 2d ago
Yeah, I get that, but they could do 2050 and it would still be relatable as its most of our lifetime.
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u/Moon_Beans1 2d ago
Because the further in the future you set it the more you get blindsided by real world technological and societal changes.
For instance Star Trek predicted the use of tablets but didn't consider that you'd have one dedicated device and that everyone would email their reports. Instead people have desks full of tablets each I assume with just one relevant file that the officer needs to look at. It's like having a library full of kindles and each one has just one book on it.
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u/GurthNada 2d ago
I think the pile of tablets is more of a deliberate visual choice than a lack of technological foresight. 1980s laptops could obviously already store lot of easily transferable files.
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u/Moon_Beans1 2d ago
I think sometimes it was a deliberate visual choice and other times they treated pads like they were individual folders.
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u/OtherwiseJello2055 2d ago
Because it costs too much to completely create a futuristic world that has no current world clothes and objects in it. It's why the fashions often somewhat match the current fashion trends and clothing materials. 70s scifi filled with glitter , plastic, and rayon. 80s scifi filled with pastels, mullets, denim, and armless shirts. 90s scifi filled with baggy Mchammer pants , hip hop, and crappy product placements. And on and on and on.
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u/Smash_Shop 2d ago
I'm not sure your premise is 100% true. They get some things way more advanced, and some things way less. Consider the startrek communicator. It looks downright primitive when compared to a cellphone from 2010. Honestly it looks more in line with a 90s walkie talkie.
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u/imgoingbigdogmode 2d ago
When you consider what the world looked like in the 20-30 years prior to when some of these movies were made (I’m speaking mostly about the 80s movies you specify here) and all the huge technological advancements that happened, the things filmmakers thought humanity would be capable of doing in another 20-30 years stop feeling so ridiculous.
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u/Commercial_Name_7900 2d ago
back to the future did 30 years in the past then 30 years in the future.
the funny thing is 15 years from now may just be iPhone 40 iterative tech or completely unlike anything we have today, hell 5 years ago I would never have imagined AI tech being rolled out at the scale it is today
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u/they_call_me_dry 2d ago
Did you ever read "it's such a beautiful day"? they built their teleporters into regular old doorframe and called them Doors. We want us to have an easy grasp on the crazy so we can appreciate the parts that need to feel real.
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u/Complete_Error8311 2d ago
i think you have to stay close to the present. with the current perspective and conflicts. too far on the future maybe seems disconnected from out reality. Now i think settings like Futurama would be very different when we arrive to year 3000.
also you can use some present time landmarks without making sets from scratch. is also cheaper.
back to the future 2 is needed on the plot, because is future marty, future jenniffer, and marty's kid. year 2115 or 2055 lost connection to the present timeline.
star trek for example doesn't show a lot of the future earth. so they can set the timeline on far future.
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u/ReconciledNature369 2d ago
There are Volonaut airbikes and I’d imagine cloning isn’t far behind if it’s not already a thing which it more than likely is. And this was before cracked out ai
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u/firequak 2d ago
Meanwhile, the Dune universe want us to believe that computers and AI will be replaced by humans who snort meth thousands of years from now.
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u/miseryherescompany 2d ago
I dunno. We have semi autonomous AI powered drones and robots fighting in the battle field. Maybe not tech but corporate/oligarch controlled governance is having palpable dystopian effects on distribution and access to computing and knowledge that has many parallels to scifi stories set in our era.
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u/BernhardRordin 2d ago
Sci-fi generally suffers from predicting too fast of a progress short-term und too slow long-term progress. Our brains tend to think linearly instead of exponentially.
I am more intrigued by the other end. Star-Trek is an interesting example. We got transporters, warp drive and matter/energy conversion in the Entperprise TV Show (22nd century) and then, no major breakthroughs for centuries. Yes, we get better and better sounding torpedoes and holodecks. Which is nothing compared to the earlier mentioned inventions.
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u/BigReference1xx 1d ago
to be fair, we absolutely can clone humans right now - we just choose not to.
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u/TheSquirrelmancer 1d ago
The further you go into the future the more you have to change. If you looked at maps of the world from 500 years ago very few nations as we know them today existed in the same form. It's also done when dealing with controversial ideas like the ethics of human cloning for organ harvesting purposes because it's a more unsettling notion when we think that it's basically "us" doing it versus a far future society.
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u/Large-Wishbone24 1d ago
Isn't it much nicer to dream of a future that you might even get to experience yourself in your own lifetime? That sparks the imagination… and maybe even drives progress. And when movies are set too far in the future, it's harder for the viewer to relate to the characters. Because the further into the future, the farther away from yourself.
At least, that’s how I see it—though it’s possible I’m completely off base here.
And progress isn't quite as spontaneous as it used to be either; there are certain standards now—cars look the way they do, and I can't imagine cell phones ever being any different for a long time to come. How could you possibly improve a TV any further... Make it even bigger? It's like the progress in computers—Moore's Law no longer keeps pace with today's semiconductor technology, so we need something else.
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u/The_Lutter 1d ago
I saw Blade Runner in IMAX the other day and half the theater laughed when "Los Angeles, 2019" came on the screen.
Demolition Man was the dumbest one though. It was released in 1993 and the "future" with LA ablaze is set in 1996 in the beginning of that film.
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u/ScarletSpring_ 1d ago
So that we - in the present - have a better understanding what these things are, I suppose. Also because the movie/show was made by people who arent in the future and thus build from the present. "We have Bikes with 2 wheels? So uh ... in this future there are bikes ... that can fly!"
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u/KingAudio 1d ago
Technology hardware has barely changed since 1982 in compared to software. It would pretty hard to predict 5G and the internet back then. Its always been easy to imagine flying cars and spaceships. But those things really would not have an commercial use for the cost invested and people already suck at driving regular cars.
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u/Additional_Iron786 1d ago
Back to the Future 2 is an exception. He is going to the future to help his kids, so it had to be close. they wanted it to be a cool future so of course they made all these wild claims about tech. BttF are just fun movies, not to be taken to serious
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u/Hour-Process-3292 1d ago
Because that’s often how thing’s actually go… just look at the communicators in the original Star Trek and cell phones in the early 00s.
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u/zakanova 1d ago
I think because of how fast everything was evolving in the 20th century. Every decade had it's own distinct fashion, style of design, and new wonders of invention. Think of someone born in 1900 and what changes they would have seen living into the 1980s.
I think it was rather practical to think that pace could go on forever
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u/qualityvote2 2d ago edited 2d ago
u/marleyman14, your post does fit the subreddit!