Sci-Fi Movies' Predictions of the 2010's

Particularly classic ones. They had some pretty radical ideas of what this decade would be like in terms of science, technology, and society. Of course most of them never came to be.

Feel free to discuss them here.

well, the "trope namer", if we had one, would have to be "Back to the Future 2", where the protagonists left the 1980's and traveled to this year. Flying cars, sadly, didnt come to pass. But wearable tech, video calls, hands free gaming, all did. See [1]

The trope is called I Want My Jetpack, I believe.

And to be honest, flying cars would suck in real life. Because not only would traffic fatalities be much greater due to altitude reasons, you'd have to learn how to drive all over again.

I recall an old Jetsons cartoon where, because there were so many flying cars zooming around, a bird had decided walking was safer.

But they had some pretty far-reaching ideas about what THE FUTURE would be like. For example, a 1960s magazine predicting self-driving cars, bubble-domed cities, computers everywhere, space colonies on Mars... by 1985.

But on the other hand, we have smartphones today that make Captain Kirk's flip-open Starfleet communicator look like a kid's toy walkie-talkie by comparison.

I totally wanted a flip phone that looked and sounded like a Star Trek communicator but I never found one.

As this is World Building rather than Live-Action Films...

One thing to keep in mind is that movie predictions almost always reflect the mores and needs of the society the writer and/or director happens to live in, and typically serve the needs of the plot rather than the other way around. (Star Trek had teleporters and communicators because that helped the story conclude in 40-something minutes, for example.) There's a bunch of reasons for this, most of which can be summed up as "this is the most economically effective".

To put it another way, these kinds of stories are generally told with Fish out of Temporal Water in mind, and the "fish" is either the protagonist or the audience; they're not generally told from the perspective of a person in the "normal present" with the setting being emphasized as "the present" rather than "the future". The future is exoticized, either as someone's idea of the future or (more likely, since someone has to make money off of it) what the audience wants to see as the future.

So, take Star Trek again. Take any TV sci-fi of the 1960s, in fact: the setting is culturally beyond our petty international problems (Cold War and Civil Rights, to take a couple in the USA) in the name of escapism. The movies of the time, the good ones anyway, take what was then the present course of the world more seriously.

The other thing to keep in mind is that sci-fi was a B-movie genre until post-Star Wars (2001 was an anomaly; I'll go out on a limb and say that only someone with Kubrick's resume could have made it), and even then it took a while for it to be fully legitimized. I say this to point out that Zeerust hits harder when the budget and vision are negligent, and setting up a setting where "the future" is "the present with a gimme or a few" doesn't help.

So, how to do it right? I think the trick is to keep the setting and the story separate. This keeps the Zeerust - which you should assume will happen when you write/direct - from being so entangled in the story that it limits it. Your story set in the FAR-OFF YEAR OF THE YEAR 2000 will then be watchable on its own merits. At the same time, if you slack off on the setting to the point that it looks bad the year you actually wrote it, that solves nothing and is a problem in and of itself.

Your story and setting, two separate things, shouldn't look so dated that it detracts from the experience.

So what do I think of as a far-off sci-fi future done right? Red Dwarf, for one; Mystery Science Theater 3000 on our side of the pond. It's made abundantly clear that the characters are a buncha guys just trying to survive in their era. Since "the future" is going to be the sort of joke a group of nerds will take turns picking apart anyway, lampshading it makes it more watchable.

Tech of the future is never predictable, even to the best minds, because there will always be some new technology that comes along and overturns everything. in the 20th century this was transistors, and later microchips.