From 'Strange Days' to 'Waterworld,' the Future According to 1995
In 1995, Braveheart, Pocahontas and Apollo 13 earned millions and won Oscars by looking to the past. But it’s that year’s remarkable output of forward-looking fare that we like the best. Among the many movies set in the future that year was the film version of William Gibson’s dystopian cyberpunk novel Johnny Mnemonic, director Terry Gilliam’s dystopian satire 12 Monkeys and the adaption of the dystopian comic book Tank Girl. (Was no one wearing rose-colored glasses?) We wanted to revisit the time-traveling troupe of 1995 and catalog the most essential pieces of information that shed light on what the future meant 20 years ago. Were they prescient or pathetic? Read on and see.
Strange Days
Year it’s set in: 1999
Vision of the future: People will be able to record experiences with devices attached to their cerebral cortex.
Backstory: It’s the year before the millennium and L.A. has gone to hell. To escape the desolation, people have taken to “jacking in” with devices that allow the lonely and bored to fully experience the recorded memories of others. Sometimes this is a good thing, providing a much needed escape. But it can take a turn for the grim, as evidenced by Lenny Nero (Ralph Fiennes), a dealer who can’t handle living in reality.
Plausible? The ubiquity of recording devices has certainly come to pass, though they’re not attached to our brains, and they don’t record all sensory experiences. Still, as in Strange Days, it is now possible to walk the streets recording everything you see without anyone knowing. And the desire to escape inside of other people’s lives is what we now call social media.
Watch the Strange Days trailer:
Virtuosity
Year it’s set in: 1999
Vision of the future: Virtual reality characters will be able to materialize in the real world.
Backstory: Denzel Washington brings his go-to character, the badass, defiant cop, into a virtual reality world created by visionary director Brett Leonard (The Lawnmower Man). His mission: to track down Sid 6.7, a computer program played by Russell Crowe who has emerged from the digital realm and taken on human form.
Plausible? Certainly not by 1999, but maybe one day? No, probably not. Virtual reality computer characters becoming living, breathing humans is as likely as Denzel never playing another cop.
Johnny Mnemonic
Year it’s set in: 2021
Vision of the future: The world will be ravaged by disease when technology poisons the airwaves.
Backstory: When data is too important to put it on a hackable computer network, where does one turn? According to Johnny Mnemonic, the brains of “mnemonic couriers” like Keanu Reeves. But that’s not the creepiest thing about this vision of this future. As explained by Dr. Henry Rollins, a disease called the “black shakes” is ravaging humankind thanks to “all the electronics around you poisoning the airwaves.”
Plausible? If you’re the type to believe chain emails, you might think so. In reality though, there’s no reason to worry about this. On the other hand, there might be some promise for the central conceit of Johnny Mnemonic coming true by 2021. How hard would it be to make a flash drive out of Keanu’s head?
12 Monkeys
Year it’s set in: 2027
Vision of the future: We’ll be able to travel through time, but we won’t lose touch with 1980s technology.
Backstory: In Terry Gilliam’s dark mystery inspired by a 1962 French short film, humanity hasn’t just acquired the ability to jump through time, but also to communicate with those in the future thanks to a particularly durable answering machine. So when Bruce Willis is sent back to a time before the near-apocalypse, he’s instructed to leave a voicemail that scientists will listen to one day in the future.
Plausible? Time travel by 2027 seems far-fetched, especially if it involves going into the past. According to Stephen Hawking, time travel to the future is possible, but not the other way around. And it’s nearly as impossible to imagine someone still having an answering machine in 2027.
Tank Girl
Year it’s set in: 2033
Vision of the future: Earth will be a giant desert, and water will be the world’s most valued commodity.
Backstory: Tank Girl envisions a world that’s become dry and desolate with “no celebrities, no cable TV, no water.” If that wasn’t bad enough, an all-powerful mega corporation has emerged to take control of what little precious resources exist. Also, mutant half-kangaroo super soldiers will be a thing.
Plausible? There’s little chance the world will be without water 18 years from now and even less of a chance mutant half-kangaroo super soldiers will talk like Ice-T. But a world where a dwindling resource creates chaos and despair? Not so implausible.
Watch the Tank Girl trailer:
Screamers
Year it’s set in: 2078
Vision of the future: Screaming will be the only way to distinguish man from machine.
Backstory: Screamers paints a grim future in which the resources of a planet called Sirius B have solved Earth’s energy problems, but at the expense of the men who have to harvest it. A war breaks out between the miners and their overlords and a self-replicating weapon that crawls through the sand and attacks people is introduced. Somehow, those machines begin to take on human form, and as the film’s trailer tells us, “The only way to tell man from machine is by the sound of their scream.”
Plausible? Unlikely. The true test for telling man from machine will always be showing them the opening sequence from Up. If there are no tears, that’s no human.
Judge Dredd
Year it’s set in: 2139
Vision of the future: Justice will be consolidated in the hands of all-powerful “judges,” and we’ll be expected to eat recycled food.
Backstory: The upside is the irrelevance of lawyers, the downside is pretty much everything else. Judge Dredd teaches us that due process will be out the window and a jury of our peers will be a thing of the past come 2139. Our freedoms will be subject to the whims of an aggressive group of corrupt narcissists and we’ll all be worse off for it. In addition, walking, talking robots will troll the streets advocating for the consumption of recycled food, which is “good for the environment and okay for you.”
Plausible? Sadly, it might be the most plausible thing on this list. Outlandish technological innovations and changes to the Earth’s make-up are pretty unlikely, but laws can change at the hands of a few bad actors. As for recycled food, there’s already a market for that.
Waterworld
Year it’s set in: 2500
Vision of the future: Water will be everywhere.
Backstory: Set nearly five hundred years from now, Waterworld could have projected that every man will be born with a Kevin Costner-shaped birthmark on his back, and we wouldn’t be able to rule it out. It’s a half century away! Instead, Costner’s magnum opus projects a world forever altered by global warming that includes evolved mutant humans with gills.
Plausible? A planet changed by global warming certainly seems possible. Humans with gills maybe less so. But hey, 20 years ago, who would have predicted that people would one day defend Waterworld’s honor? Clearly, anything can happen.
Watch the Waterworld trailer:
