There is nothing more depressing than watching a film made in the past which takes place in a future that has already happened. You can go out to Blockbuster Video right now and rent movies that take place in the distant future of 1998, and they’ll show how everybody is going to be cruising the streets in hoverboards and flying to Mars in private rockets. But making a movie that takes place a few years or so into the future and depicting such an advanced society is a lot like making a movie set back in 1990 and having everybody wearing top hats and driving Model Ts to their jobs at the monocle factory.
I recently watched a ludicrous movie called Strange Days, which was made in 1995 and takes place in 1999. In this magical future world of four years from when the movie came out, everybody has VR headsets, gas is $3 a gallon and widescreen TVs are in all the homes. I watched this movie and I was like, what kind of mental retard would assume that in four years technology would have advanced to the fucking VR headset level? Who’s the Nostradamus who decided that everybody would go out to Best Buy and buy a widescreen TV right after they left the theater? I’m no film director, but it doesn’t take Miss Cleo to realize that society probably wouldn’t have changed that much in only four years.
The worst part about movies that take place in the future is that the only things that have actually changed in real life remain exactly how they were when the film was made: hair styles and computers. In Alien, for example, everybody is flying around in outer space and making robots, but when they need to boot up their computer, it’s some sort of retarded Atari which takes up half of the entire ship. Good job, Alien, you successfully predicted that technology would improve in every area except the one area where it actually improved in. I’m not sure when Alien was supposed to take place, but it’s probably 1986 or something like that. Because that’s just the type of shit the film industry would try to pull.