They say art imitates life. Sometimes the opposite seems to be true and we see that life seems to imitate art. Movies that were made as a commentary on a possible, but unlikely dystopian future appear to have been eerily accurate. Gadgets that sci-fi films conjured up are reality today.
The movie featured hologram technology that is reality today. Now we have politicians campaigning via holographic presentations. Musicians, even long-dead, can ‘perform’ again via hologram.
Perhaps James Cameron was able to predict how military tech would develop in times to come when he created drones for his film. Now drones – for surveillance and military strikes – are commonly used by militaries all over the world.
The TV series, as well as the movies, are inspirational for geeks... with good reason. It was Capt Kirk’s communicator that inspired Martin Cooper and Motorola’s first cell. Uhura’s earpiece resembles today’s Bluetooth sets. And the communicators worn on the wrist – smart-watches anyone?
This film predicted so much that we now take for granted, but which wasn’t even a twinkle in the inventor’s eye at the time – Skype, tablets and even space tourism (if Elon Musk has his way).
We haven’t been able to travel back in time yet, but the wearable tech kids used at the dinner table in the film is here today. In addition we have fingerprint recognition, a self-lacing shoe and more that the movie predicted.
Reality TV: where viewers get to look inside other people's world and feel better about their own was predicted in this Jim Carrey movie. It was perhaps the very voyeuristic nature of mankind that predicted shows like Bigg Boss, The Kardashians, Survivor, Emotional Atyachar, Splitsvilla and so many others.
The iconic Keanu Reeves film predicted what we often suspect about our world – that we are all living inside a computer simulation; that reality is not reality! The movie predicted self-driving cars, robots, climate change that destroyed the world as we know it –and a lot of the dystopian realities of today.
With so much of our personal identity now being in digital form, the premise of The Net is scarily real today. The film was about identity and data theft that completely obliterated the existence of a person. The Sandra Bullock movie also predicted how we could order pizza online.
The satirical black comedy was about a fabricated war created to distract people from a presidential sex scandal. In today’s political scenario of spin doctors who can spin any news to favour their masters, there is an absolute epidemic of fake news that deluges us. In many ways, the movie starring Dustin Hoffman and Robert De Niro was amazingly prescient.
The cult novel Nineteen Eighty-Four was written by George Orwell in 1949 and film adaptations were made in the 50s and 80s. The book and movie spoke about a dystopian society with an autocratic regime that kept a watch on and controlled everything that citizens did, said and even thought. The totalitarian super-state decides what people should think and do – politically and personally. With world seeing an alarming rise in authoritarian regimes that think nothing of surveilling, manipulating and controlling their citizens, we see alarming aspects of this dystopian movie in our lives today.
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