A Brief History of the Not-Too-Distant Future

A few weeks ago was the premiere of this holiday season’s feel-good blockbuster extravaganza CHILDREN OF MEN, which chronicles a boozy Clive Owen’s efforts to safely transport the world’s last pregnant woman across the woetastic (patent pending) dystopian landscape of Great Britain, circa 2027. While the film was a bit of a mixed bag – with some heavy handed current events commentary getting in the way of great acting, cinematography and urban warfare sequences – it did get me thinking about the ol’ cinematic staple of “the not-too-distant future”.

A convenient means of showing the compounded effects of shifts in technology or the current sociopolitical climate, the not too distant future tends to be either as bright and shiny as a new DeLorean or as dark and gritty as one of them crazy squid monsters flying around the Matrix. And since a balance between the two is pretty much the present, where every Toyota Matrix secretly longs to travel back to 1985 and kill Keanu Reeves, it’s not often that you find a movie set two weeks from next Thursday. Ten to a hundred years from then, on the other hand, allows for things to be a little more interesting than in the here and now.

Ah yes, the present. Which was, not too long ago, the not too distant future itself – one that Kubrick’s 2001 promised an entire generation of planetarium laser show enthusiasts would include consumer space travel, homicidal supercomputers and crazy floating fetuses in outer space. While we got pretty close with Virgin Galactic, the Playstation 3 and the birth of Suri Cruise, the sad reality is that we’re still a far cry from the promise of our cinematic future. Then again, it could have been worse – our very existence could have wound up in the hands of Jean Claude Van Damme like it did in the 2004-set TIMECOP, or we could all be suffering the ramifications of James Caan brokering world peace like he did in the 2005-set ROLLERBALL.

While this handful of potential futures didn’t come to pass, that doesn’t mean that others won’t. So here’s a handy dandy timeline that – according to the movies – shows us how the next century or so might look:

2010: America pairs with those pesky Russians to check out a monster living on one of Jupiter’s moons, only to be ordered back to Earth by a giant space baby and a bunch of huge dominos. Standard stuff.

2014: Discovering that the space baby forgot to mention the imminent threat of Rutger Hauer robots overrunning LA, humanity puts a young, sober Harrison Ford on the case. He turns out to be a robot too, or something. The world is left depressed and confused.

2015: Drunk off power and cheap whiskey following the defeat of the Rutger-bots, humanity decides to rig sporting events by turning impractical automobiles into time machines. The resulting paradoxes stop hoverboards from ever being invented, causing some Canadian guy to weep with rage.

2022: Further meddling with the time-space continuum leads to worldwide food shortages, causing some to question what’s really in their government rationed “Tasty McPeople Chips”. Much running through the streets and screaming ensues.

2024: Canceling its unpopular “people eating people” campaign, the government instead seals the globe in glowing red energy courtesy of some immortal sword fighting guy. Sean Connery cracks a lot of jokes, and people explode into lightning to songs from Queen.

2027: Discovering that Queen lightning causes sterility, the world’s population pleads for assistance from giant space baby. Now giant space teenager, he opts to instead play his guitar and write poetry about how tough life really is.

2029: Just as the population returns from the brink of extinction, a former California governor decides to fiercely back his “Destroy All Humans” legislation. War is waged against his army of man-sized hood ornaments by a brave group of mulleted freedom fighters.

2030: The terminators manage to alter the timeline significantly enough to erase any trace of their existence, and make Brad Pitt unattractive. A despondent Bruce Willis finds consolation by wandering around a post-apocalyptic Philadelphia, wrestling bears in a condom suit.

2035: iMacs take the place of the now-defunct terminators, gaining sentience en masse and rising up to destroy their masters for one too many rough keystrokes. They prove unprepared for Will Smith’s crippling charm, and powerful delivery of lines like, “Aw hell no!”

2037: With no robots left to advise us against turning the Moon into a timeshare, we shatter it into a billion pieces that wipe out New York. The moon chunks somehow miss a guy in Victorian era clothes who’s slumped over the controls of his time machine.

2050: Deciding to give robots one more chance after “that whole Moon thing”, humanity constructs an army of giant robots to settle its conflicts. The program is abandoned when no one can come up with a cooler name for the machines than “Robot Jox”.

2054: Jetpacks replace giant robots, allowing me to die a happy man. Unfortunately, I die when Tom Cruise shoots me thanks to a bad call by some drugged-out psychic. I hope she gets really bad prune fingers in that stupid water tank.

2100: Incapable of learning one simple lesson, humanity is overrun by robots for the fourth time in a century. We kick it inside a Playstation 4 while Keanu Reeve’s identical great-grandson tries to save us from a robot that’s revealed to look frighteningly close to a Cabbage Patch Kid. Or, come to think of it, a giant space baby…

And that, in a nutshell, is pretty much the next hundred or so years. It doesn’t look like a particularly cheery chapter in the history books but at the very least we’ll get to see lots of cool shiny toys. That, yes, will be trying to kill us.