There are some things we've done better on, though. Video calls are real and on much smaller, portable screens than the ones shown in the movie, adding whole new levels of future-y awkwardness to lulls in conversation heretofore unknown by our voice-only ancestors. Also in that movie, the best they could do was a black mayor while we have a black president. But to be fair, this isn't everyone's idea of progress.
It's a little silly to rely on a fantasy sci-fi comedy movie as realistic futurism though, I know. The 2015 date was an arbitrary plot convenience adding symmetry to the original film's 30-year time interference in the other direction to 1955, I get it. This was a film that had a teenager demonstrating how cool he was by dorking around on a Valterra skateboard. Pfft. They barely got 1985 right.
If what you're looking for is something with a bit more of a predictive punch, you have to leave the realm of silly throwaway comedy and look to a piece of art that takes itself more seriously, more earnestly from the jump. Something that is not afraid to leave the security blankets of the wisecrack and the sight-gag behind in favor of something darker, more grown up, more willing to wrestle with itself, if you want a vision of what was to come. Of course I'm talking about Superman III.
Remember, this was the one after the Richard Donner arc had shot its wad in the first two movies. You know, the good ones with Gene Hackman as Lex Luthor and then Terence Stamp as a smooth-as-fuck General Zod, rocking the shit out of a deep-V-neck black satin track suit, who only talked about killing hundreds of thousands of people. What happened to subtlety, man?
No, this was the one where the villains were Robert Vaughn, as a shittily obvious Luthor stand-in when Hackman opted out, and Richard Pryor as a patsy who robs banks and cripples the world after learning computer code writing from a class he heard about from a matchbook cover.
Yes, the rest of it (except the part where Superman fights himself in a junkyard, obvs) is terrible, but really focus on that last part: computer terrorism up to and including bank robbery. You want spot-on predictive menace in film? Look no further, motherfucker, because the future is now and Gus Gorman is its herald.
They even recycled his devious scheme to enter malicious code into a bank computer to slice off infinitesimal amounts of money until they accumulated into an enormous sum in Office Space in 1999, but even then, we weren't ready to take the full brunt of the future about the head, neck and chest.
That happened this year, when we realized some enterprising creepers pulled off the full Gus Gorman in the amount of $1 billion.
Of course some aspects of the film are silly and unrealizable. Nobody uses matchbooks anymore, for example. Hardly anyone smokes and the ones who do are migrating to those fancy tampon-applicator-looking vapor wossnames. And those who are left smoking in what I'm sure they refer to as the "artisinal" method would likely scoff at anything so proletarian or manufactured as a matchbook. My guess is they light their hand-rolled smokes with a flint-and-steel striker or, probably, with their iPhones. If there isn't already a fire app, please note the date stamp on this post. Patent pending, bitches.
Be disappointed with Back to the Future if you want, but I won't indulge. We live in an age of wonders. So we can't walk our pets with hovering drones. You know what we can do with drones? Kill hundreds of civilians in a single missile strike. That's not nothing. OK, yes, I will admit, with this one example, it seems like with technology we may have slightly overshot. Usually past the people we were aiming at and into a housing block.
---
*OK, slightly more complicated, but we're getting there, goddamnit.
Posts
No comments:
Post a Comment