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Tomorrow People

Roddy McDowall and Kim Hunter in Escape from the Planet of the Apes
  • Posted at 1:32pm
  • 23 May 2008
  • by AndrewCollins-RT

The read-out on the spaceship that crash-lands at the beginning of Planet of the Apes helpfully informs us that the year is 3978. But in the second sequel, Escape from the Planet of the Apes, three of the simians from that distant future take a trip back to the 20th century to, frankly, mess with the fabric of time.

Film-makers love to monkey with us like this. But the trouble with the future is that it eventually becomes the present; science fiction becomes either science fact or science "that never actually came true – did it?”

George Orwell’s Nineteen Eighty-Four remains the most famous example: written in 1948, it was made into a feature film first in 1955 and again in . . . 1984, by which time its grey, totalitarian dystopia was certainly at odds with the ra-ra skirts and Boy George impersonators of the time.

Blade Runner: the Final Cut is set in 2019, so there are only a few years to go before we can dissect its predictions. Although Blade Runner’s replicants (lifelike cyborgs) are a long way off, the film’s moving billboard adverts have become a reality – I was confronted with a gesticulating 118 118 runner on the way to work the other day.

(For more insight, you can see the documentary Dangerous Days: Making Blade Runner on Sky Movies Sci-Fi/Horror on Spring Bank Holiday, Monday 26 May.)

The end of civilisation as we know it, whether caused by nuclear war, as in Mad Max 2, or global plague, as in Twelve Monkeys or the recent I Am Legend, is a popular theme. Such films are more effective if set in a recognisable but indistinct “near future”.

To borrow a phrase from data management, this “future-proofs” it. Better still, take an emerging contemporary technology and make it commonplace, such as cloning, which formed the basis of The 6th Day, with Arnold Schwarzenegger.

Director John Sturges’s prescient thriller Marooned, released in 1969 at the height of the space race, inadvertently predicted the future by only a year. In it, three astronauts are stranded when their return rockets refuse to fire. Spookily, the real-life Apollo 13 mission encountered similar nail-biting problems in 1970.

But we’re still waiting for those apes.

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