Lumen Wirltuti:Warltati 2025 - Flipbook - Page 38
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Movies
Fast forward to
the future
The future on film is everywhere – from the silent reels of
Metropolis (1927) to the neon dreams of Blade Runner (1982);
from Elysium (2013), where extreme wealth inequality means the
rich live off-world and the poor stay on Earth, to Francis Ford
Coppola’s wonderfully baroque and batty Megalopolis (2024), set in
a futuristic New York City. These films are both mirrors and crystal
balls: they reflect, and they project.
By Ben McCann
In 1902, Georges Méliès made his landmark silent film A Trip to the
Moon. We follow a group of astronomers who build a bullet-shaped
spaceship and launch it to the Moon using a giant cannon. Upon
landing, they explore the lunar surface, encounter hostile Moon
inhabitants, and eventually return to Earth with a captured alien.
Space travel, rockets, Moon exploration, aliens among us. The
future was born… and it looked great!
Intriguingly, we moviegoers now live in the very “future” that
some of these films first imagined. So, it’s worth asking how
accurate were these predictions? What did filmmakers get
startlingly right, and where did they miss the mark?
More than a century later, visionary filmmakers continue to
call upon a battery of special effects techniques, costumes and
designs, and CGI-generated backdrops to create compelling
and convincing futurescapes. Whether great cities in the sky or
underwater civilisations, dystopian wastelands or alien planets,
film imagines how technological, social or environmental changes
might shape humanity.
One of the most accurate recent portrayals was Spike Jonze’s Her
(2013), in which Joaquin Phoenix falls in love with an intelligent
operating system named Samantha. Even a decade ago, the idea
of emotionally responsive AI seemed far-fetched, yet today many
converse daily with virtual assistants like Siri, Alexa and ChatGPT.
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