Optimistic future sci-fi movies.........

[Christopher]

Bill and Ted's Excellent Adventure.

Oh yeah! Except that wasn't really set in the optimistic future it posited, except for brief glimpses, so it's a borderline case.


By the way, to go off on a bit of a tangent, there's an upcoming prose-SF anthology called Shine which is devoted to optimistic science fiction, as an attempt to counter the preponderance of dystopian SF out there, which is just as great in prose as it is in film (if not more so). I submitted a story to it myself a few days ago, so maybe I'll even be in the anthology, though I'm not holding my breath.

 

[Trent Roman]

^ I'm working on mine in another window.

Fictitiously yours, Trent Roman

 

[MANT!]

So MORE utopian futures

5th Element
Back to the Future II
Forbidden Planet
2001
2010 (yes a bit Cold Wardy..but still optimistic)
LOTS of Soviet Era Russian Science Fiction movies were optimistic.
Plymouth (TV movie)
Space 1999
UFO (alternate 1980)
Just Imagine (alternate 1980)

 

[Mistral]

Eternal Sunshine?

 

[RJDiogenes]

2001 and 2010, thought technically in an alternate past now (neo-Steampunk ) are both pretty optimistic.

The book 2010 was pretty optimistic, but the movie was quite pessimistic, depicting an Earth on the brink of nuclear war and needing alien intervention, essentially, to knock some sense into humanity. Clarke's novel showed American and Soviet astronauts who got along excellently, reflecting the real-life amity between scientists from the two powers, but Peter Hyams tried to make the film more "topical" by throwing in a lot of Cold War tension, which just ended up dating the film badly when the Soviet Union fell just half a decade later.

True, but the ending was pretty uplifting. No future in fiction can be completely Utopian; even Star Trek had conflict with other major powers.

 

[Zulu Romeo]

I wonder if the far future at the end of AI: Artificial Intelligence would count? With the alienoid beings and advanced genetics and things? I mean, everyone was happy...

 

[Christopher]

The book 2010 was pretty optimistic, but the movie was quite pessimistic, depicting an Earth on the brink of nuclear war and needing alien intervention, essentially, to knock some sense into humanity. Clarke's novel showed American and Soviet astronauts who got along excellently, reflecting the real-life amity between scientists from the two powers, but Peter Hyams tried to make the film more "topical" by throwing in a lot of Cold War tension, which just ended up dating the film badly when the Soviet Union fell just half a decade later.

True, but the ending was pretty uplifting. No future in fiction can be completely Utopian; even Star Trek had conflict with other major powers.

The ending was uplifting in the sense that a humanity that would've blown itself to kingdom come if left to its own devices was distracted from that hatred by an entirely external force. That's not an optimistic depiction of human society. That's an extremely cynical and dystopian depiction of humanity, a humanity so venal that it can't avoid self-destruction without the intervention of a deus ex machina.

To quote a column from the editor of the Shine anthology:

Try to come up with a story where things actually change for the better with respect as to how they are now. A story that implements a solution for one of the great problems of our time, or that dies trying. And no: starting with an apocalypse and then showing a little light at the end of the tunnel (see point 2 above: ‘dystopia lite’) does not count: that world is, in general, much worse off than we are today;

Hyams' 2010 can only be called optimistic in the sense that it depicted a world much worse off than the real one was at the time and then made it a bit less worse off at the end. That's not really an optimistic future not compared to our world. It's also the kind of story the Shine editor calls "Alien Saviours" -- it doesn't actually entail a solution to our problems when someone else swoops in and fixes things. And the ending of 2010 doesn't even count as a real solution; it just distracts humanity from its own conflicts without doing anything to address their causes or prevent their recurrence.

 

[Greylock Crescent]

I suppose it depends on the focus of the story. If the focus is the events leading up to an apocalypse, or the apocalypse itself, that's hardly optimistic. But if a story is set post-apocalypse in such a manner that the trauma has somehow shaken humanity to improve itself (or brought about conditions that allow for such an improvement), then you could say it's more optimistic. Particularly if the story explores those improvements in some fashion.

That is, essentially, what happened in Trek -- its optimistic future only evolved after a catastrophic period of war.

In that sense, 2010 (the film) isn't particularly optimistic because its focus isn't on the improvement humanity is implied to make following its events, but rather the conflicts leading up to such an improvement.

 

[Grant]

All of those are good choices. I purposely didn't bother to try to think of any, but i agree with most of those.

2001 & 2010 had fairly optimistic visions---although 2010 showed the world on the brink of nuclear war.

BTTF 2 looked functional.

Forbidden Planet very much so and of course it was the inspiration for Trek.

I had also thought of Minority Report.

I deliberately said 'optimistic' NOT utopian. But even in a utopia there could be some exceptions to the general trend. Trek was a utopian Earth but still created people like Captain Tracey, Kodos, Prof Crater & the Dr Adams from Dagger of the Mind.

I don't think an optimistic future prevents a good story being told, but i think hollywood generally does.

 

[Christopher]

I don't think an optimistic future prevents a good story being told, but i think hollywood generally does.

It's not just Hollywood. It's a pervasive assumption throughout SF literature.

Personally, I think dystopias are the easy path to take for telling a story. I find it more interesting to portray an improved future but explore the problems and complications that arise from its improvements. For instance, could the members of a utopian society get too complacent or too self-righteous and end up becoming well-meaning oppressors to a group they considered less enlightened? Or could life become so trouble-free that people have difficulty coping when a crisis does happen?

One Deep Space Nine episode that's always particularly impressed me is "Hard Time." Chief O'Brien was trapped in a virtual simulation (which he believed real) and while there he did something horrible. And he couldn't live with himself because he felt he'd failed to be as good as humanity was supposed to be. He lived in an idealized society, he believed in its ideals, and it tore him up that he'd fallen short of them. That's a great way of telling a story about a utopia and still generating conflict and drama.

 

[Joy]

If they ever make a movie out of the novel I'm writing, that'd be one to add to the list. However, as in all societies, there are always a few hidden dark things amongst all the light.

I'd say Back to the Future's future was pretty darned awesome. And we've still got 6 years before we get there, so I wonder just how many things in the movie will have become a reality by our 2015?

Joy

 

[Christopher]

I'd say Back to the Future's future was pretty darned awesome. And we've still got 6 years before we get there, so I wonder just how many things in the movie will have become a reality by our 2015?

Hoverboards: No. Not unless they have a maglev track under them or something.

Flying cars: Maybe in a prototype stage, but never practical for general use due to the hazards.

Mr. Fusion: No. Didn't make sense anyway. (Fusion fuel is hydrogen, not aluminum cans, banana peels, and the like. Unless it was actually a fusion torch of some sort, a hot plasma that vaporized those things and used the vapor as working fluid of some sort.)

Self-fastening/programmable clothes: Quite likely. We're already getting clothes and jewelry with computer capability built in. If anything, the movie was too conservative; we'll have t-shirts with embedded video screens by then.

Window-shade TV: Perhaps not in that form, but given the development of flexible LED surfaces, we should definitely have video screens that can bend, fold, and roll up (see the t-shirt example above).

Free-floating holographic ads: Perhaps, to an extent. The sci-fi conceit of holograms in midair is rather fanciful, since any image needs something to reflect or emit light from, but there are some prototype devices that use a mist of vapor or microscopic particles as a sort of "screen" to project a 2D image into the air above them, and there's another prototype device that uses lasers to ionize the air into glowing "pixels" -- though that latter one would probably be kind of hazardous to get close to and probably would work better at night.

De-aging treatment: Probably not by 2015.


Then there are these articles:

http://www.11points.com/Movies/11_Predictions_That_Back_to_the_Future_Part_II_Got_Right
http://www.11points.com/Movies/11_Predictions_That_Back_to_the_Future_Part_II_Got_Wrong

 

[Harvey]

I never saw Back to the Future's world as one to be taken completely seriously. Flying cars and holograms reflect the same kind of fantasy that was depicted in the cinematic west and the nostalgic 1950s. Its version of 2015 was as absurd as its version of 1885, and 1955. But not in a bad way.

Programmable clothes are certainly an interesting concept, though.

 

[Barbados Slim]

Eternal Sunshine?

First lines of the movie are Joel transcribing into his journal "February 14, 2004."

What about Demolition Man? I barely remember what the movie was really about but I remember there were really nice people, cars that encased the driver in foam in an accident and all the Taco Bell you can eat.

Minority Report was on the cusp of dystopia because of the Precogs. Being arrested for something you haven't done yet was the screwed up theme of the movie and led to the tagline "Everybody runs." That's not happy time future at all.

I'd say Fifth Element because there was prosperity and cruise ships and cool stuff.

 

[Ensign_Redshirt]

What about Demolition Man? I barely remember what the movie was really about but I remember there were really nice people, cars that encased the driver in foam in an accident and all the Taco Bell you can eat.

Demolition Man was "Huxley meets Stallone" and Brave New World isn't exactly utopic. Also, sex was outlawed in Demolition Man and their ruler tried to assassinate the dissident leader. I would hardly call that "optimistic". It was an utopia on the surface only, depicted in a satiric fashion.

 

[tharpdevenport]

Bill and Ted's Excellent Adventure.

Even the dirt is clean.

 

[Christopher]

I'd say Demolition Man was a utopia in the satirical sense of the word. We're using it in this thread to mean a society that actually is better, but keep in mind that the word literally means "no place," implying that a perfect society is always a fiction. Stories about utopian futures often reveal that they have a hidden darkness, that beneath the surface happiness is a state with oppressive or disturbing policies.

 

[Trent Roman]

^ What's sometimes referred to as counter-utopia, or as Jameson prefers "anti-utopia", the deconstructive imitation of utopian speculation usually based on the idea that such perfection, or near-perfection, runs counter to something ingrained in human nature and will thus always be false, accomplished only through one form of visceral denial or another.

In my own work I've found it useful to distinguish between the "overt dystopia", the future which is in-your-face negative and oppressive (1984, THX 1138), and the "false utopia" (like a false paradise), a society or realm which imitates the conventions of utopia and may even appear to be utopian at a superficial level, though the text/film usually provides the reader with the knowledge to distinguish the true from the false (Brave New World, Demolition Man). If anybody here has seen Zardoz, it's a good example of the two types co-existing: the post-apocalyptic world of the brutals is in-your-face dystopian, while the Vortex of the Eternals is the false utopia which is luxorious and immortal, but corrupt at its core.

Fictitiously yours, Trent Roman

 

[stj]

Andrew Niccol's Gattaca has the hero defeat the dystopian social system by force of will. That's actually pretty optimistic.

 

[Harvey]

Andrew Niccol's Gattaca has the hero defeat the dystopian social system by force of will. That's actually pretty optimistic.

Good choice. Totally slipped my mind.

You're right--though the film postulates a future where children who were not genetically manipulated at birth are discriminated against, the hero basically overcomes this with tenacity, some money, and a little help from the doctor at the very end. And it’s an excellent film, too. Thank whoever you’d like they lost the preachy ending with the title cards, though. That would have been too preachy.