Have sci-fi filmmakers stopped trying to imagine a hopeful future? A look at why grim dystopias may have taken hold in storytelling:
You may have heard a variation on a common complaint: “It’s the 21st century. We should be flying around with jet packs and eating food in pill form.”
It’s a sentiment – itself probably dying out now we’re 25 years into the 21st century – that says a lot about our collective, unrealised dreams of the future. Decades ago, science fiction writers, futurists and scientists once had utopian visions of what the 21st century might look like. In Things To Come (1936), which William Cameron Menzies directed from a story by HG Wells, humanity survived the wars and pandemics of the 20th century and rebuilt itself into a glorious, Rome-inspired superstate in the new millennium, its sights set on conquering other planets.
Following the Second World War, a generation of sci-fi writers imagined lunar bases and gleaming cities full of monorails. The 1950s pulp storyteller’s idea of the future became such a cliche that it made its way into cartoons – first The Jetsons, then later Matt Groening’s affectionate parody of all things sci-fi, Futurama.
Now, say what you will about the post-war, largely American view of the future. It was patriarchal, overwhelmingly white and filled with a post-imperial sense that the western way was the only correct one – a sentiment that also sneaked into the utopia of Gene Roddenberry’s Star Trek in the 1960s. But however dated that vision of the future might be, it’s at least a vision.
At some point in the 1980s or 1990s, storytellers – particularly in film and TV – stopped imagining what a bright future for humanity might look like. Apocalypses abound – from the fuel-drained collapse of Mad Max to the post-societal horror of Cormac McCarthy’s The Road to the zombie hells of Night Of The Living Dead or The Walking Dead. There are also plenty of dystopias, all of them riffing on the warnings of George Orwell, Aldous Huxley or Yevgeny Zamyatin. Squid Game, for example, has been a success for Netflix on the scale of its biggest TV shows, including Stranger Things and Bridgerton.
If utopias exist in movies at all, they tend to be nostalgic for the past rather than looking forward. Brad Bird’s Tomorrowland (2015) was inspired by the futuristic Disneyland attractions that first appeared in the 1950s. Its glittering, high-tech world of spires, robots and jet-packs was also, interestingly, created by a secret society of geniuses who retreated to another dimension to build their brave new world – something that has interesting parallels with certain real-world industrialist fantasies, as we’ll see shortly.
Even Star Trek, one of the best-known visions of a future utopia, has become rather less sunnier in its outlook in recent years. Section 31, Paramount’s straight-to-streaming movie, continues the modern notion that beneath the benevolent Star Fleet, there’s the titular Section 31 – a covert, CIA-like organisation that does “the nasty stuff that no one likes to think about,” as Deep Space Nine writer Ira Steven Behr said.
Where, then, is the 2025 equivalent of the jet-pack, the clean energy city, the comfy space travel of 2001: A Space Odyssey? In all the possible versions of the future we imagine for ourselves, why are our storytellers struggling to dream of one in which humanity has bettered itself, conquered its demons, and found a balance between scientific progress and harmony with nature? Given all the technical breakthroughs we’ve experienced since the 1950s – affordable computing, the internet, and so on – our stories about the future have become more downbeat rather than optimistic. Why is that?
One possible reason is that the people who engineer our future have changed since the 1950s. The great space race of the 50s and 60s was funded by the state – NASA in the US and SSSR in the Soviet Union. Today, rockets are sent out by private companies like SpaceX (albeit funded in no small part by taxpayers’ money). By now, the great space race has long since given way to the race for AI – a global rush funded not by governments, but by private firms owned by billionaires.
The last truly utopian view of the future, perhaps, was the one dreamed up in the dawn of the internet age. At the start of the 1990s, the world wide web was described as a new frontier of freely available information – terms like ‘global village’ were thrown about as predictions were made of a smarter, better connected society where knowledge was only a few keyboard presses away.
That was before the billionaires and the corporations moved in, and the internet was instead carved up between such giants as Google, Amazon and Facebook. Those companies made trillions from the commoditisation of the public’s data. Governments, too slow to realise what was happening, or too compromised to intervene, watched as tech firms and their owners became richer than some developed nations.
Today, the future isn’t being written by writers like Isaac Asimov, Carl Sagan or Arthur C Clarke. It isn’t sculpted by academics at universities, or legislated into being by politicians with dreams of a better tomorrow. Instead, the narrative is in the hands of a dozen or so members of the super rich whose hunger for money and influence is matched only by their selfishness.
The sense of a shared destiny or a collective desire for a better future – however unlikely it might be – no longer exists, and can no longer exist because there is no consensus. There are the increasingly fragmented, tribal groups of the world’s masses, scrabbling anxiously over ever-diminishing resources. Then there’s the will of the stock market, which is entirely divorced from the experiences of society. In 2022, there was a cost of living crisis as people struggled to heat their homes or buy food; meanwhile, the stock market, bolstered by the AI bubble, soared.
As the filmmaker Daniel Espinosa, director of the 2017 sci-fi horror, Life, once told me, “In our society today, if you ask a normal person, ‘What do you think Earth’s going to look like in 100 years’, he doesn’t have a clue. He doesn’t have an idea about what it’s going to look like in 20 years. He doesn’t have a fucking idea. Not even a theory. There’s not even a philosophical thought. The only thing we can worry about is tomorrow, because that’s how messed up we’ve become.”
If there are visions of the future left, they’re the ones imagined by billionaires. In his book The Survival Of The Richest, author Douglas Rushkoff lays out a few of these fantasies of the super-rich. Some members of that club believe they’ll be able to ride out any coming apocalypse – environmental, societal, and so on – by living in fortified underground bunkers. Others think they can live as so-called ‘seasteaders’ – communities of elites and hangers on bobbing about at sea on clusters of boats, rigs or artificial islands. Still others, like Elon Musk, have fanciful visions of bases on Mars.
In fact, Musk recently wrote in a flurry of tweets that he wants his company, SpaceX, to eventually shuttle approximately one million human beings to Mars. Musk doesn’t appear to have read the observation from experts that Mars’ lack of a magnetosphere will make human survival on the planet all but impossible, or that it might be easier to fix the problems on our own world rather than spend trillions trying to reach an inhospitable rock some 140m miles away.
In this regard, two 21st century works of sci-fi might explore these billionaire fantasies more accurately than any other. One is BioShock – Ken Levine’s 2006 videogame which may (after some false starts) eventually become a Netflix movie. In it, a bunch of Ayn Rand-reading elites build a city under the sea – a place where they can create their own laws and avoid paying pesky taxes. Before long, the entire place sinks into squalor, social malaise and outright violence. By turning their backs on society, the elites of BioShock also lost touch with their humanity.
The other work of sci-fi is Elysium, written and directed by District 9’s Neill Blomkamp. It wasn’t a huge hit at the time, and critics seemed to regard it as a step backwards following the Best Picture-nominated District 9. Ironically, that 2013 film, flawed though it might be, describes the billionaire fantasy better than just about any other before or since – and lays out the flaws in that fantasy.
In the near future, Elysium’s story goes, the gap between the rich and poor has hollowed out the middle class. The entire globe is now pretty much like countries as geographically far apart as Mexico, Nigeria or India are: poverty is endemic, leaving wealth concentrated in the hands of a tiny club. As a result, Earth has been left a crime-ridden, slum-filled wasteland; the rich, meanwhile, have decamped to a vast space station which looks like Beverly Hills expanded to the horizon.
Fittingly, this space station, the Elysium of the title, is modelled on a famous design created by futurist Syd Mead in 1980. In short, it’s a vision of the future that has been adopted by billionaires. It’s a more perfect metaphor than perhaps Blomkamp himself realised at the time: a vision of a future where all of humanity is lifted by scientific process has instead become a playground for the rich.
On Elysium, residents live in gilded luxury. They alone have the technology which can cure just about any illness – as we see later in the film, it can even fix fatal-looking head wounds. Rather than share this tech with the rest of the 99 percent, the wealthy keep it in Earth’s orbit, far out of reach.
Led by Matt Damon’s terminally ill factory worker protagonist, Max, a small band of fighters heads to Elysium to hack into its medical facilities – by force if necessary.
Of course, the notion of the rich living in a vast space station is as fanciful as BioShock’s city under the sea, and deliberately so. But while technologically it’s far-fetched, it’s hardly less of a fantasy than the ideas the billionaires have in Rushkoff ’s book. Interestingly, Rushkoff arrives at the same conclusion that Blomkamp does in Elysium: no matter how hard billionaires try to create a firewall between themselves and the rest of us, something will inevitably go wrong.
In a meeting with a handful of these elites, Rushkoff was once quizzed nervously about certain scenarios that might occur in the wake of some sort of collapse. How could the wealthy prevent their own bodyguards from turning on them? If money ceases to have value, how can they induce their private armies to do as they’re told? What would stop small armies of hungry, desperate poor people from storming their expensive bunkers?
Rushkoff gently suggested that, to avoid those situations from happening, it might be better to think about how they could ensure that the collapse doesn’t happen in the first place. At worst, they might be advised to be nicer to their underlings today so that they aren’t tempted to cut their masters’ throats in their sleep if the apocalypse does happen.
In Elysium, the poor storm the barricades. They get the medical aid they need, and the rich are left to run for the hills, screaming. It’s a lesson the billionaires in the real world might want to absorb: that which isn’t distributed willingly will, one day, almost certainly be taken. Until someone does something about the super rich, we’ll always struggle to envision a brighter future for our species. Instead, we can only look ahead to the inevitable collapse, and what we’ll do when it happens.
Those who think they can retreat into bunkers with their wealth should probably read Edgar Allan Poe’s The Masque Of The Red Death. While the rest of the country reels from a deadly pandemic, a prince gathers up his noble friends and parties in the warmth of his castle. Needless to say, things don’t turn out too well for that prince.
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