Tag Archives: set in the future

Aliens (1986) | James Cameron



Aliens starts where the first one leaves off, with Ripley (Sigourney Weaver) in hypersleep drifting in the escape shuttle. What Ripley doesn’t know until after she is rescued is that she has been that way for 57 years.  When she gets back, the company that owned her ship is very interested in why she decided to blow it to smithereens, and are not too impressed with her implausible “alien on board” story, since they have recently inhabited the newly terraformed world Ripley claims to have encountered the alien on, and have found nothing to indicate there is any danger there.  That is, until the company loses all signal from the far-off settlement, and offers Ripley full reinstatement if she will act as an advisor to a squad of Marines sent to investigate the affair. Features Michael Biehn, Carrie Henn, Lance Henriksen, and Bill Paxton in support. Written and directed by James Cameron.


Akira (1988) | Katsuhiro Otomo



In this breakthrough anime masterwork, Akira starts out in 1988, much of Tokyo is destroyed by a mysterious that spreads like a dome of energy over the city. The rest of the film is set in the year 2019, as we peek into the post-apocalyptic megalopolis that has been rebuilt as Neo-Tokyo, where the government is corrupt, civil unrest looms large, and biker gangs run the streets. One member of such a biker gang is Tetsuo Shima, who ends up seemingly running into an escapee from a government experiment who uses some sort of powers to protect himself from getting run over. The escapee is taken back into custody, as is Tetsuo, who also becomes part of the experiment to bring out his dormant psychic abilities, trying to give their subject the ability to read minds and perform telekinesis. However, due to Tetsuo’s difficult life, the powers he attains becomes more than the less-than-grounded lad can handle emotionally, so he springs himself from the lab and begins to wreak havoc on the streets of Neo-Tokyo, on a search for the powerful but absent entity known as Akira, who is seen as the person responsible for causing the explosion in 1988.  Tetsuo’s emergence raises the specter of Akira anew, as the protestors in the city see him as a force to stem the tide of a military takeover, with all of the tension threatening to destroy the city all over again if his friends can’t stop the rampage.  As the city seeks to rebuild, especially in the wake of the upcoming 2020 Olympic Games, the problems that once plagued the city have continued to manifest, with history doomed to repeat itself for never addressing the woes the first time around.


Blade Runner (1982) | Ridley Scott



The date is November 2019. The city is Los Angeles. Earth has undergone massive population explosions in the urban areas, the city landscape is a mish-mash of every culture, and almost everywhere you go there are advertisements. The most prominent of these advertisements is floating space-barge advertising the Off-World colonies, offering excitement and adventure. It appears there’s much excitement to be true, when six replicants (android-like creations that resemble humans in nearly every possible way, with the exception of enhanced agility and strength, constructed to work as slaves in off-world colonies) commit mutiny and escape to Earth, where they have been outlawed under penalty of death, to find a way to increase their four year lifespan, causing a Blade Runner named Deckard (Harrison Ford), a special LAPD task force whose job is to kill any and all replicants, to come out of retirement. This visionary sci-fi masterwork is directed by Ridley Scott.


Hands of Steel (1986) | Sergio Martino



Hands of Steel is an Italian-produced film obviously influenced by James Cameron’s The Terminator if combined with the basic plot of First Blood. Set in the near future, we find a beefy thug (Daniel Greene) has been brainwashed by the evil head of a pollution-spewing corporation called the Turner Foundation, headed by John Saxon’s Francis Turner, we soon learn, to assassinate a popular ecological guru leading an environmental movement that is set to make major radical changes to the drastically worsening country. But he’s no ordinary thug; Paco Queruak is a war veteran that was left for dead before getting his body used for a radical cyborg assassin experiment, rendering him with an electronic mind and a body of hardened steel, underneath his very human-like exterior. However, at the last second, his human side begins to question what he’s doing, leaving him on the run from the organization that made him in order to hide their tracks. Paco goes on the lam to his old stomping grounds in Arizona, where he meets a lovely motel and bar owner named Linda who offers him room and board in exchange for doing some chores around the property.  Meanwhile, he engages the locals in arm wrestling contests he can easily best them in. Meanwhile, he’s being pursued by a world-class hitman, and also the FBI.


Back to the Future Part II (1989) | Robert Zemeckis



Marty and Doc must head 30 years into the future to save Marty’s kids from calamity,l but end up making a mess of the past when Biff Tannen takes over the DeLorean.  Will they save themselves, and their pasts, as well as their futures?

This ingenious sequel takes the premise of the original film for a loop-de-loop of logic few were expecting it to go, from the minds of Robert Zemeckis and Bob Gale.