[ad_1]
By 2022, or so the movies had it, humankind would either have run out of food, seen society fall apart, or found solutions to its battle for survival on a dying planet. In films set in this year, the crises tend to change based on how recently the movie was made. In each case, the mission is the same. A problem is magnified in order to explore the question: What happens if we continue down this path? How does our current dystopia compare with the imagined ones? Take a look at five futuristic films set in 2022. (Alert: Spoilers ahead.)
.
A descent into cannibalism
Richard Fleischer’s Soylent Green (1973) is set in an eco-dystopian New York. The city’s population has ballooned to 40 million. A year-long heat wave caused by the greenhouse effect has poisoned the water, polluted the soil, decimated plant and animal life.
Vegetables are a luxury. Real food is so expensive that only the very rich and wealthy can afford it. The vast majority of people subsist on a diet of wafers made by the Soylent Corporation.
Soylent Green, the company’s most recent product, is a nutritious food that claims to be made from oceanic plankton but (spoiler alert) is actually made from human flesh.
Though the film is loosely based on Harry Harrison’s 1966 novel Make Room! Make Room!, that novel was set in the late 1990s and contained no cannibalism. Soylent Green took the premise of too many people and “what will we eat” and gave it a further twist.
Reality check: We aren’t at the food-crisis stage (yet). But we do all consume something controlled by mega-corporations. It’s not food, it’s information. And in many ways, it is cannibalistic.
.
AI siren in a virtual world
In Alien Intruder (1993), a group of convicts serving life sentences are sent on a deep-space rescue mission to retrieve a lost ship. In exchange, if they survive, they will have their sentences commuted. And along the way they are offered free reign to live out their sexual fantasies in a virtual reality. Then a mystery woman named Ariel appears in-game. She eliminates the other women in the program and starts to turn the men against each other. Before long, the men are seeing Ariel in the real world too.
Virtual reality was just beginning to take shape in the 1990s. Today’s stranger-in-a-simulation sci-fi includes the added layer of AI. In the 2021 film Free Guy, for instance, an AI-driven non-player character gains consciousness and becomes the only good guy in a VR game that rewards wrongdoing.
In reality, VR is evolving quite differently. There are experiments that aim to use it as part of drug rehab and anti-domestic-violence programmes. VR simulations are aiming to help inmates prepare for life after release. If the AI siren in the 1993 film resembles anything, it is the bots and fake accounts now used so effectively to spread hate, chaos, mistrust and division.
.
An annual day of lawlessness
In The Purge, the 2013 hit that spawned a five-film franchise, the US has taken a strange turn. Following widespread economic collapse sparked by multiple wars, an ultra-religious totalitarian government is voted into power. The new leaders decide that society will be more orderly if, on one day a year, all crime is permitted. A 12-hour period is accordingly allotted annually for The Purge. The government encourages participation.
During the rest of the year, crime drops to all-time lows, the economy and communities benefit. But it soon becomes clear that The Purge is claiming mainly the have-nots, with the elimination of the poor helping to reduce the need for subsidies and welfare.
In real-world 2022, as economies weaken from a combination of instabilities and war, workers’ rights and welfare schemes are being visibly reduced. The pushback is following more traditional routes, as workers band together to unionise in mega-corporations such as Starbucks and Amazon. Meanwhile, ultra-religious, democratically elected, right-wing governments are certainly on the ascendant.
.
Sky’s the limit
Geostorm (2017) is equal parts hope and despair. In Dean Devlin’s imagined 2022, a satellite system controls all weather, making natural disasters obsolete. When the satellites break down, it’s up to an astronaut to save the world.
In real-world 2022, the only meaningful control humankind seems to exert on the climate is the ability to make it worse, as a result of still-mounting carbon emissions. The events in the film, thankfully, still feel exaggerated: typhoons that submerge skyscrapers, curtains of lightning. It’s interesting that the fictional technology used to control the climate in Geostorm requires collaboration on a global scale. Perhaps a sequel could explain the mystery of how that was achieved.
.
Aliens abroad
In The Tomorrow War (2021), time-travellers from 2051 arrive in 2022 to warn humankind of an impending war with aliens, one that will become impossible to win by their time. Through the film, it is revealed that the aliens arrived centuries earlier, but became entombed in the polar ice caps. As the ice caps melted amid global warming, they were freed in the 2040s, to breed, multiply, and feast on humans.
By 2051, there are only 500,000 humans left. But humans have built a wormhole that lets people travel through time. So governments unite to institute a worldwide military draft and send recruits into the future to help fight the war.
The Tomorrow War is meant to serve as a wake-up call on the urgency of the climate crisis. By the end, it is clear that nothing they do in 2051 can save the human race. The time to act was decades ago.
Access this premium story for Free on the HT app
Enjoy unlimited digital access with HT Premium
Read unlimited premium stories for free on the All new and revamped HT App
Subscribe Now to continue reading
[ad_2]
Source link
Press down, he breathes, and my voice of Nina as he directs my hand down, from the top of his shoulder, the side of his chest buspirone female viagra dosage The Effect of Medium Chain Triglycerides on Time to Nutritional Ketosis and Symptoms of Keto Induction in Healthy Adults A Randomised Controlled Clinical Trial