The global Pandemic has made planning for the future extremely difficult. Are you saving for a tropical vacation this summer? It is not known if you will be able to fly to that country at that time. That mid-January drink with friends? Hope nothing changes before then.
Science fiction was busy imagining what the world would look like in the future. How accurate were their efforts? We can start to assess the accuracy of five movies set in the once-far future world of 2022.
Green that is soylent.
The most famous science fiction movie of all time is 1968's Planet of the Apes, which is set in a future version of Earth. Soylent Green, released in 1973, is bleaker and more prescient than ever. The movie takes place in a future world in which overpopulation, climate catastrophe, and pollution mean that regular people eat Soylent Corporation wafers.
Soylent Green is a new product from the corporation that is supposed to be made from ocean plankton, but which is actually made from human flesh. The famous line is, "Soylent Green is people!"
The climate crisis backdrop seems particularly on the money, even if things haven't quite reached the all-year- summer world depicted in the movie. The part about alternative, unusual foodstuff is definitely true, whether it is seafood made out of red algae, lab-grown meat, or calls to eat insects.
If you read that a Y Combinator startup was launching a new wafer product that promises to give you all the natural nutrition your body needs, you wouldn't blink twice. Soylent is a food company that is doing great business. I have eaten Soylent for 3 years. Here is how it changed me.
The Purge is a crime.
When Soylent Green was shot, it seemed like the future of the movie was in the year 2022, but The Purge was set in the year 2022. The Purge universe depicts a United States in which a totalitarian party has taken over and turned it into a crime-free world with unemployment rates around 1%.
If that sounds better than current life, it should be balanced by the fact that they have passed a law that makes any crime legal for one night per year. A mixed bag, really.
In real life, businesses struggling in the wake of closings and people leaving their jobs in large numbers are both examples of how crime hasn't been erased and how the Pandemic has had a big impact on employment. Unemployment is not at 1 percent.
There is a hint of dystopia in the real 2022. Political discourse is more about whether President Biden should push his social spending legislation in the face of challenges than it is about whether making murder socially acceptable once a year is a good idea.
Scenes of people locked inside their homes and masked people on the streets could come from either version of 2022.
Alien intrusion
Alien Intruder looks a lot like a 1993 sci-fi movie. Billy Dee Williams plays a character in the film that is about four convicts with life sentences who are sent on a deep space rescue mission. They are allowed to live out sexual fantasies in virtual reality environments on the way. The crew starts to turn on one another when a mystery woman called Ariel appears in virtual reality and reality.
It's not as good as the billing suggests, but it's a mixture of Suicide Squad, Ex Machina, and spaceship drama of your choice. They use laptops from a future in which the MacBook Air never existed. Maybe using 1990s-era laptops is one of the ways future convicts are punished.
In real life, space trash is a real problem in 2022, just as it was in 1993 when Alien Intruder was made. Space trash is the problem of debris from satellites and rockets, rather than simply junky sci-fi movies.
The best you can say is that both space travel and virtual reality are still being explored. We don't know if prisoners are sent on deep space missions.
If you were really bold, you could argue that Alien Intruder's plot is an example of fake news in which concepts that spread through the virtual world end up driving us apart. We should cast Nick Stone, the writer of Alien Intruder, as a modern-day Nostradamus.
Billy Dee Williams is still on our screens in the year 2022.
A time runner.
Mark Hamill had a sci-fi movie in 1993 that was partially set in 2022. The movie trailer for Time Runner has a sound-alike ripoff theme, just in case you wondered which movie franchise this was.
He must stop aliens who look like humans from invading the country. If you can make it work, that is a good way to save on the alien effects budget.
We can't comment on the truth of the "is the world's ruling elite secretly a race of extraterrestrials?" conspiracy theory. It is not as blatant as it is in this movie if it is true.
There is not much to say about the rest of the film, it looks like a budget version of a certain future imagined by James Cameron. The 1990s hairstyle is probably coming back in vogue. Not sure if that one is a successful prediction.
A storm.
Dean Devlin made his directorial debut with a disaster movie about freak weather events caused by weather-controlling satellites put in place to stop freak weather events. A series of disasters are being stopped by a rush from the actions of a man.
The shortest period of time between filming and the film's release is the year in which it is set, and seeing asgeostorm is the newest film on this list. It is no surprise that it has a 2022 that looks more like the actual one than some of the earlier, more speculative entries on this list.
The science part of things is not very good. Climate engineering research has its basis in reality, while the last few years have highlighted how terrifyingly commonplace extreme weather events are. In the real world, solutions will have to involve more than just the face of a man.
Editors' recommendations
You should consider abandoning apps and services in 2022.
