How Sci-Fi Movie Depictions of the Future Compare to Reality

Since almost the beginning of cinema filmmakers have attempted to depict the future. While of course they weren’t necessarily meant as serious predictions, I think it’s still fun to compare their version of the future with what really ended up happening.

There appears to be a regularly consistent trend of movies overestimating technological advances, at least in some ways. One of the clearest examples is space travel and transportation. The film that defined space travel on the big screen for a generation, 2001: A Space Odyssey, depicted a future over three decades from its 1968 release date. In Stanley Kubrick’s film, space travel is mundane and there’s even a manned mission to Jupiter. In reality, we’ll be lucky to have a man on Mars in the next few decades, and a mission to Jupiter feels impossibly far off.

 It’s not shocking that Kubrick and co-writer Arthur C. Clarke were so optimistic given that the film was made during the space race when this kind of technology appeared to be advancing at a rapid rate. Humanity went from putting the first person in orbit in 1961 to landing on the moon only 8 years later, so it wasn’t crazy to think that 30 years later, we might be exploring other planets.

Released fourteen years after A Space Odyssey, the original Blade Runner was set in 2019 and also vastly overestimated how quickly things would advance as Earth has already colonized other planets. This is even more egregious than 2001 as it should have been obvious even in the early 1980s that this wasn’t happening anytime soon.

There are also flying cars, a popular sci-fi staple audiences would see again a few years later with Back to the Future Part II. According to that film, we should have had flying cars for over 3 years now. The film’s writer and producer Bob Gale has stated that they knew this was completely unrealistic, but just thought it would be cool to see in a movie. The movie’s director Robert Zemeckis said that he doesn’t “like films that try and predict the future” and that “rather than trying to make a scientifically sound prediction that we were probably going to get wrong anyway, we figured, let's just make it funny.”

It does seem incredibly unlikely that we’ll be using flying cars anytime soon, but Uber has unveiled a concept for a flying taxi.

The seminal 1988 anime Akira was set in 2019 and its portrayal of transportation technology is pretty accurate. Kaneda’s bike is a bit high tech, but it and other motorcycles in the film appear to be fundamentally similar to those in reality. It’s mentioned that it has electronically controlled anti-lock brakes, which is common in current vehicles. Automobiles, helicopters, and tanks all appear to be relatively normal and space travel is not mentioned.

Movies also frequently think way too highly of humanity’s future advancement in robots and AI. The aforementioned Blade Runner features androids that are as intelligent as a human and are able to pass as one unless given a lengthy test, something that’s obviously quite far off.

The original Terminator from 1984 posited a world where an extremely powerful and self-aware AI called Skynet basically controls much of the world and then decides to attack humanity in 1997. It goes without saying that we aren’t even close to such an AI in 2019, much less in the 90s. The sequel, Terminator 2 is even more absurd in that it was made in 1991 and still has Skynet taking over in 1997. And not only are there robots that are capable of blending in as humans and shrugging off gunfire, in the second film they can shapeshift due to being made out of liquid metal.

However, these films are kind of an exception in that the Skynet technology was based on the Terminator that went back in time in a sort of bootstrap paradox. So the fact that technology advanced quickly is actually a key plot point.

The Westworld movie came out in 1973 and was set in 1983. It features an amusement park full of androids that are pretty much indistinguishable from humans. Clearly, looking back this seems quite silly.

In the 1995 anime Ghost in the Shell, humans can entirely replace their bodies and brains with cybernetic parts. While the film is set in 2029, which is, of course, a decade away, I think it’s safe to say we won’t be seeing this technology anywhere close to that year.

I think with robots and AI, there’s less of an excuse than with space travel, as it’s not like there were massive advancements in the area going on in the 80s and 90s.

One area where movies seem to often underestimate advancements is in communications and entertainment technology. Rarely, if ever, did films predict anything resembling the rise of the Internet and smartphones.

In 2001, they do have video calls, but people don’t carry around personal devices. Heywood Flood still has to go into a dedicated booth where he manually types in a phone number. Many works of science fiction predicted some form of video calling, which is reminiscent of Skype or Facetime, but it never seems to work quite like it does in real life.

Likewise, Blade Runner does have video phones, but again they are used in a dedicated phone booth. It’s really not that shocking that so many movies predicted video phones, as they are just a combination of two previously existing technologies, whereas the internet was a whole new paradigm.

Back to the Future Part II actually got quite a bit right when it comes to this kind of technology, despite the filmmakers’ lack of concern with accuracy. Devices are voice-activated, which is similar to Siri on iPhones or smart speakers like Amazon Alexa. Like 2001, there are video calls, but people still use fax machines that print out physical pieces of paper.

Marty’s children wear goggles that seem to be like some sort of virtual or augmented reality and they also have qualities of smartphones. People also have the ability to pay for things with their fingerprint, which is definitely something that’s been gaining traction in the real world.

In the 1995 film Strange Days, there’s a new form of entertainment where people can experience the recorded physical sensations of another person. Ridiculously the movie is set only 4 years into the future in the year 1999. It does partly take place on the New Year’s Eve before the new millennium, and while it certainly makes for a dramatic backdrop, it’s hardly essential to the story.

Futuristic weaponry in science fiction cinema is a bit of a mixed bag. Blade Runner feels accurate in that its version of 2019, people still use low-tech guns that aren’t too far off from what people use in real life. However, in the Terminator films, the scenes set in the future do feature laser guns.

In Akira, there are energy weapons, like Kaneda’s battery powered Heavy Laser Rifle, but they seem to be relatively rare. We see real-life weapons used for most of the film, like Micro Uzis and the Colonel’s Desert Eagle. This is a world where World War Three happened, so it makes sense that more effort was put into creating advanced weapons. That could also explain the Satellite Orbital Laser, a weapons platform that fires on Tetsuo from space.

When it comes to stuff like this, filmmakers may have been unconcerned with potential realism. They might have just wanted weapons that looked cool, and to be honest, I can hardly blame them.

Of course, it’s ridiculous to expect filmmakers to accurately predict the future all the time and they often aren’t even trying, but our visions of the future still reflect our anxieties and hopes in a  very interesting way.

The Ethics of Historical Accuracy in Film

Filmmakers have been adapting historical events and true stories since basically the beginning of cinema. In that time, movies have had varying degrees of historical accuracy and I’d like to look at what ethical concerns that may raise.

Some people may disagree with the idea that this is even a concern. They say “it’s just a fictional movie after all” and that “people should know films aren’t always a good representation of the truth.” But unfortunately, the reality is that people often don’t know or care about how inaccurate movies can be and just assume what they see on film is true to history. If events are portrayed a certain way in popular media, it seeps into the collective consciousness regardless of the truth. This can be especially dangerous with regards to people who are still alive or issues that still have significant reverberations today.


A common argument against this viewpoint is that concessions have to be made for the sake of the plot and I certainly understand where people coming from, especially in regards to big-budget Hollywood films. The studios are spending tons of money and don’t want to take risks in terms of narrative. However, there are a few reasons why I don’t find this argument 100% convincing.

To me, if the true story isn’t interesting enough on its own and needs massive embellishments, maybe it just shouldn’t be made into a film. And of course, many of the people these films are about did live fascinating lives, they just don’t necessarily fit into a tidy three-act structure. But that’s where the artistry of filmmaking comes in. They can still make it compelling with dialogue, performances, cinematography, and all the other stylistic elements of cinema.


If the filmmakers really just feel they can’t make a good film out of the real story, they could just change the names of the people involved and that would solve the issue, at least in my opinion. For instance, the novel and the movie Primary Colors are clearly about the presidency of Bill Clinton, but with names and details altered. I think this communicates clearly to the audience that things are just loosely based on reality.

But it seems as if filmmakers want to use famous real-world figures and events as a crutch. A movie about a fictional monarch isn’t as easily sold to audiences as something about say, Queen Elizabeth.

And to be clear, I’m mainly just talking about things that completely contradict reality. Obviously,
with most historical topics, we don’t know many of the exact details or specific quotes that were said, and admittedly filmmakers have to fill in the blanks to a certain extent. But altering major things is a much bigger deal.

A great example of the dangers of factual imprecision is controversial director Oliver Stone’s 1991 film JFK. Throughout the film, he takes liberties that consistently make the case for a conspiracy regarding Kennedy’s assassination seem like it’s backed up by more evidence than it really is. For starters, Joe Pesci’s character is shown admitting that he was part of a CIA plot to kill JFK, but the real person Pesci was portraying maintained he was unaware of any conspiracy and didn’t even know Lee Harvey Oswald. There are already tons of interesting things about JFK’s assassination; you don’t need to make stuff up to make the story compelling.

This did result in a huge controversy and the film was pretty much pilloried by the press. Obviously, JFK conspiracy theories were already widespread, but this film definitely helped keep them alive in popular culture. And Stone’s movie has even been credited with causing Congress to release documents related to JFK’s murder. So regardless of your opinion on whether or not the theories are true, clearly films like these can have an effect on society’s perception of reality.

In 2015, a film was released about the life of mathematician Alan Turing called Imitation Game. In it, Turing covers up the existence of a spy in order to keep his homosexuality a secret.  This is completely made up to add drama and is basically slandering a war hero. Turing has been dead since the 1950s, but I can’t imagine his living relatives were too happy about this.

On top of that, the filmmakers created tension that wasn’t there between Turing and his superior Alastair Denniston in order to give the movie a villain. This led his family to publicly state that they were deeply offended. A situation like this could have been easily avoided by simply changing Denniston’s name and I can’t really come up with a good excuse as to why the filmmakers didn’t do this.

Historical accuracy led to a controversy about Best Picture winner Green Book. It features pianist Don Shirley, whose brother called the film a “symphony of lies.”

I do think there are a small number of clear exceptions. Take, for example, the 2012 film Abraham Lincoln: Vampire Hunter, which is about exactly what you’d imagine hearing the title. Any reasonable person watching such a film should be fully aware they aren’t seeing a realistic depiction of history. The entire premise is a “what-if” situation.

Furthermore, I think there’s an exception to be made for movies that are set in a historical situation like World War Two but with completely fictional characters. There were millions of people involved with the war and we can never know all of their stories. And this doesn’t affect the reputations of real people.

Something like Quentin Tarantino’s Inglourious Basterds is a good example, which makes clear with its ending that it’s portraying an alternate history. It makes no claim of being based on a true story, and while it does feature real figures like Hitler and Churchill in minor parts,  the main characters are all fictional.

It should go without saying, but it’s not that I dislike all movies that alter history. I thought The Favourite was one of the best films of 2018 and many things were different than in the life of the real Queen Anne.

But I often hear people suggest that filmmakers have no responsibility whatsoever to adhere to the facts, and to me, this is going way too far in the other direction.