Temporal Anomalies Movie Review
It's a good idea to stamp expiration dates on food, medicine, and unexposed film – but not so prudent with sf. Even well-told genre tales tend to lose their luster if their predictions are tied down to a specific year that has come and gone.
The big exception is George Orwell's 1984, which, although meant as a commentary on society in 1948, even today remains a potent warning, probably more so than had Orwell gone with an early working title, “The Last Man in Europe.” However, scattered across screen sci fi are less fortunate examples of portentious prognostications by camera-wielding Cassandras….
1980 in JUST IMAGINE (1930): Just Imagine is an oddball, unwieldy mixture of vaudeville gags, banal musical numbers, and satirical speculation in which jokester El Brendel (a then-popular comical Swede) is struck by lightning in 1930 and resurrected by the super-science of 1980, when numbers have replaced names, pills are food, and test-tube infants can be bought at sidewalk vending machines. Pic concludes with a ‘rocket plane’ journey to a Mars inhabited by pretty alien girls and evil twins. Its elaborate futuristic Manhattan skyline contributed to a budget that helped make this a massive financial flop, which reportedly gave epic-scale sf a reputation as box-office poison in Hollywood for years afterwords. Though not yet released on video, footage from Just Imagine resurfaced in Buck Rogers and other fantasies.
1970 in THINGS TO COME (1936): Spanning 100 years, this H.G. Wells-inspired classic of sf prophecy starts out with an uncanny (but at the time, not uncommon) forecast of World War in 1940, complete with a Pearl-Harbor style sneak bombardment of a placid England. The ensuing battle and plague-tainted aftermath lasts though the 1960s. In 1970 a feudal gangster rules the rubble through brute force until technologically advanced airmen from an authoritarian Utopia crush his ragtag militia. The pic ends with the first attempt at a lunar expedition – in 2036.
1970 in PROJECT MOON BASE (1953): Master sf author Robert Heinlein contributed to this screen cheapie (conceived as a TV pilot but released to theatres) that hits close to the calendar with an orbital moon shot in 1970. When the ship crashes on the lunar surface the crew erect an ersatz shelter, and the infamous finale has a matronly lady U.S. president performing the long-distance marriage ceremony via radio of the two male and female survivors, thus preserving 1970s American moral decency.
1973 in IT! THE TERROR FROM BEYOND SPACE (1958): Minor classic of the alien-monster genre undercuts its serious tone a tad with the opening statement that it takes place in 1973, in the aftermath of the first successful human voyage to Mars.
1980s in QUEEN OF OUTER SPACE (1958) and CONQUEST OF SPACE (1955): Former is a camp-classic B-picture (whose script simply reversed the digits of its year of release a la George Orwell); latter is a ponderous, high-minded epic that drew from the latest scientific sources. But both followed the widely accepted doctrine that permanent, manned space colonies, shuttlecraft, and giant zero-G launch platforms would have to be exist as a precondition before anyone dared attempt a landing on any other planets or moons.
1965 in BATTLE OF THE WORLDS (1959): This Japanese War-of- the-Worlds type saga envisions the first space station, of traditional doughnut shape, activated in 1965. This draws the attention of nasty dwarf aliens on the moon, who destroy it and provoke interplanetary war with the united and resourceful nations of Earth.
1979 in GORATH (1962): Similar in concept to Battle of the Worlds, this Japanese disaster epic depicts the nations of the world as seasoned space-farers in the near future, who together accomplish incredible and improbable engineering feats to fight an external menace; in this case a wandering star on a collision course.
1990 in 1990 (1977): Orwellian BBC TV series (not available on video in the U.S.) depicting life in tomorrow's dismal England dominated by left-wing welfare-state bureaucracy. Heroic reporter Edward Woodward regularly leads dissidents to that free-market paradise, the USA. The program only lasted a year, but it must have done its job; ruling conservatives have won elections over there ever since.
1993 in PRIMAL SCREAM (1987): This low-budget sf detective tale gets the Hound's acceleration-evolution award for foreseeing aerial cars in every garage and deep-space colonies only six years around the corner.
1994 in ALIEN NATION (1988): Short-dating the arrival of thousands of aliens in the very near future mainly gave filmmakers an excuse to use footage of President Ronald Reagan out of context, apparently welcoming the ‘Newcomers.’