10 Reasons Why We Should Pay More Attention to the Movies

The future they predicted has arrived

We should be more careful listening to the movie prophets. Each day reality meets movie scripts.

They are becoming so accurate that maybe it is time to consider them more prophesies from the future than just cinema plots.

Here are ten examples where the movies disturbingly resemble actual life. But spoiler alert. If you haven’t seen some of them, I might review some parts of the plot.

1. Pandemic

“The worst pandemic in modern history was the Spanish flu of 1918, which killed tens of millions of people. Today, with how interconnected the world is, it would spread faster.”

— Bill Gates

Ok, let’s start with the obvious and most close to our lives movie plot, the one where some strange virus created by nature or in a laboratory escapes and begins a pandemic.

This plot feels too close to home now after one year in lockdown because of COVID-19. But how would be reacted if we listen more carefully to movies like:

Contagion (2011). It all starts when a businesswoman returning from Hong Kong dies after being diagnosed with an unknown virus. Later the Centers for Disease Control and Prevention (CDC), after many people die, discover it comes from a virus transmitted by respiratory droplets. I will not tell you the rest of the plot; I’m not that evil.

“12 monkeys (1995).” A deadly virus, released in 1996, wipes out almost all humanity, forcing survivors to live underground. They believe that a group known as the Army of the Twelve Monkeys was responsible for releasing the virus.

Outbreak (1995). Another film where an ebolavirus and orthomyxoviridae-like Motaba fictional virus arrives in California, carried by a monkey bitten by a vat, comes from Zaire imported by some animal trader.

These movies have in common with the latest pandemic that they came either from a bat or escaped a laboratory. The CDC and the World Health Organization (WHO) were unprepared and struggled to find a vaccine. The government hid or denied the virus, and they sent the army to the streets to enforce a shutdown.

I hope that this time reality surpasses fiction, and we learn our lesson, and we are ready. Nevertheless, I’m not convinced whether that is going to happen.

After all, we learned little from the Spanish Flu, H1N1 Swine Flu, and the Ebola outbreak in 2014.

2. Robots.

“The danger of the past was that men became slaves. The danger of the future is that men may become robots.”

— Erich Fromm

After looking at the videos of Boston Dynamics dancing robots, you have to admit that they look and move a lot like the ED-209 from Robocop or the AMP from Avatar.

Still, they don’t resemble Sonny from “I Robot,” Robocop, or C3PO, but they are starting to look and move a lot like them.

If you wonder how long will it take till we see humanoid robots like the Terminator, Westworld’s hosts, or AVA from EX Machina? They are not too far away.

Take a look at Nadine, created by the Nanyang Technological University in Singapore, or Sophia, a new human-like robot from Hanson Robotics. They are beginning to look scary real.

By the way, do you know there is already a company called Skynet Worldwide Express, providing delivery services worldwide? Brilliant, let’s kick fate in the butt.

3. Large Corporations Effects on the Environment

“Big corporations have money and power to make sure every rule breaks their way; people have voices and votes to push back.”

— Elizabeth Warren

Remember the movie Wall-e, where The Axiom, one of the countless Starliner spacecraft built by The Buy n Large Corporation, was in charge of evacuating people into space because the Earth was that overwhelmed by trash.

If you recall, it was Wall-e’s job to compact trash and place them into giant mobile incinerators. Although we haven’t reached that point, we are getting close.

Amazon packaging is causing an environmental problem. We have received an 8*8*8 cardboard box from Amazon containing a single item that could perfectly fit in a smaller package, and the rest filled with tons of paper.

Researchers found out that all this extra packaging adds more congestion to our cities, pollutants to our air, and garbage to our landfills.

If we don’t ask shipping companies to end this practice or call our Representative in Congress to place stricter rules, we will soon have to evacuate earth and end like the people in the Axiom spaceship.

4. Mars

“We’ve gotta become the Martians. I’m a Martian — I tell you to become Martians. And we’ve gotta go to Mars and civilize Mars and build a whole civilization on Mars and then move out, 300 years from now into the universe.”

— Ray Bradbury

What do you give a man who has it all? The answer is simple, a space rocket so that he can go to Mars.

That’s what Elon Musk, the CEO of Tesla Motors and founder, CEO, and chief designer of SpaceX, is planning to do.

He is planning to get humans on Mars by 2026, which is seven years before NASA. So, according to Musk, someone will be harvesting Poop-Tatoes on the Red planet like in the Martian film.

This is not all Tesla’s CEO said, also that he could be sending 3 Starships every day by plans 2050 until there is a one million people colony on Mars, creating jobs on the red planet.

Like in the plot of Total recall, the 1990 and 2012 American science fiction films, let’s hope they don’t allow anyone with the name Douglas Quaid on board.

Some people might think this is all BS, and they are planning to fake the Mars trip like they allegedly did with Apollo’s Moon landing. Inspired in the film “Capricorn One.”

But if you go, please, Mr. Musk, don’t bring some extraterrestrial microorganisms to study on Earth. We’ve all seen what happened in “Species” or “The Andromeda Strain.”

5. Global Warming

“Right here, right now, is where we draw the line. The world is waking up. And change is coming whether you like it or not.”

— Greta Thunberg

Scientists agree that we need to do something fast to stop the melting of permafrost. But not if we are far, near, or beyond the point of no return.

We have to reduce the amounts of carbon dioxide in the atmosphere. Either with more aggressive legislation to reduce the burning of fossil fuels or with new technology extracting carbon dioxide and methane from the atmosphere.

A Swiss Company launched Climeworks CO2, a revolutionary machine to remove CO2 from the atmosphere and transform it into valuable fertilizers.

Anyway, we have to do something if we don’t want to end living climate change like in “2012,” “The Day After Tomorrow,” and “Mad Max” movies. Or even worse, in a “Waterworld,” which not only paints an awful post-apocalyptic world filled with water but is regarded as one of the worst conceived and executed movies ever.

Of course, we have the option to ruin this world for future generations and hope Elon Musk helps us leave Earth, like in “Titan A.E.,” “Interstellar,” and “After Earth.” Also, a bad movie with terrible acting (Sorry, Will Smith’s fans.)

6. Alien Ships

“Absence of evidence is not evidence of absence.”

— Carl Sagan

Last month, the Pentagon released three Navy videos containing “unidentified aerial phenomena.” Another wordy way to say U.F.O., but it didn’t explain the phenomena.

At least it is a start, as many U.F.O. enthusiasts say. This could mean that maybe all that mumbo-jumbo about Area 51 and Roswell incident was real.

And in the following months, we find out that movies, like “Close Encounters,” “Contact,” and “The Arrival,” were not Science Fiction Films but documentaries.

And to this point, I retract my opinion about Will Smith because maybe we are going to need him on a future “Independence Day.”

7. Gadgets

“Dreams about the future are always filled with gadgets.”

— Neil deGrasse Tyson

In his “The Decay of Lying” essay, Oscar Wilde once wrote, “Life imitates Art far more than Art imitates Life.”

And today, this is more evident when we see all the new devices that Tech companies announce. Smartwatches can make phone calls with displays and many functions, like the Apple Watch resembling the one used by Dick Tracy many years ago.

Or the handheld communicator that Captain James Kirk used in Star Trek and the Language translator, both Apps are now available in our cells.

Remember the first time we saw Princess Leia’s message, “Help me, Obi-Wan Kenobi; you’re my only hope.” Reproduce by a Holographic image, years later, researchers from Brigham Young University in Provo, Utah, created an authentic hologram.

Or Luke’s bionic prosthetics, which inspired Open Bionics Company to develop the “Hero Arm.” The world’s first clinically approved 3D-printed bionic arm, helping children and adults to regain their abilities and confidence.

Today there is no big stadium that doesn’t use a multi-digital billboard, where we see play repetitions, player stats, advertisements, and even wedding proposals. But if you remember, these humongous displays decorated the dystopian metropolis of Los Angeles in “Blade Runner,” forty years ago.

Let’s hope that this is where all the similarities end, and we don’t end on a nuclear conflict between Matthew Broderick and a computer like in 1993’s “WarGames.”

8. Space Station

“The space station is the most unique laboratory we’ve ever built. The reason we have it is to do research on materials, people, medical matters, pharmaceuticals — the possibilities are nearly endless.”

— John Glenn

Nothing boosts our imagination, like the idea of looking at our beautiful blue planet from space. Everyone in the world has sometimes imagined what it could be to live in space.

Perhaps we don’t like to recognize it and say that it is too dangerous, expensive, or nonsense to accept the idea. But you can be sure that we all have thought about it.

And yet, since Yuri Alekseyevich Gagarin’s flight onboard the Vostok I in 1961, only other 569 people from 41 countries have done it.

But picturing a human being living in space was possible in Stanley Kubrick’s “2001: A Space Odyssey,” where we first glance at The Space Station V, which according to NASA, inspired the International Space Station (ISS) orbiting the Earth.

We also saw the first communication and multifunction device. And though Apple says they invented the iPad, if you look again in the movie, you’ll see the first tablets called “newspads” operated by Dr. David Bowman and Dr. Frank Poole, fifty-three years ago. Proving what Oscar Wilde wrote about life imitating art.

9.- In Daily Life

“One machine can do the work of fifty ordinary men. No machine can do the work of one extraordinary man.”

— Elbert Hubbard

All of us who were children in the 60s can remember the happy times the Jetsons gave us.

Also, Rosie the Jetsons’ household robot, flying cars, and automatic appliances capable of cooking food in seconds, vacuum robots, smartwatches, drones, flat-screen TVs, etc.

But also production robots, a pill camera that travels inside the body taking pictures and sending video. There we saw the first video conference, digital journals, automatic sprinklers, and jetpacks, among other things.

In 1997, we glanced at the internet of things in the sci-fi-horror film “Demon Seed.” A scientist develops Proteus IV, an artificially intelligent computer that controls all the house, but it quickly spirals out of control.

We saw the MQ-1 Predator, the first military drone capable of firing weapons triggered remotely by a ground operator miles away, in the movie “Terminator” in 1994.

Witness how Douglas Quaid traveled in a self-driving car, “Total Recall,” suddenly went crazy and crashed just like a Tesla.

10. Honorary Mentions

At the cinema, we do not think — we are thought.

— Jean-Luc Godard

We couldn’t finish this list without mentioning two of the greatest science fiction films.

The first one is 120 years old. “Le Voyage Dans La Lune” (A trip to the moon 1902), pictures for 13 minutes in glorious black and white, how explorers travel to the moon in a cannon-propelled space capsule.

Sixty years before Gagarin’s flight to space and Apollo’s Moon Landing.

The other is the iconic 1927 film “Metropolis.” Where you see human-like robots, flying cars, electronic billboards, and endless skyscrapers, it doesn’t matter how old you are, but if you consider yourself a science fiction fan, you have to see this black and white masterpiece.

Take away

“Talking about dreams is like talking about movies since the cinema uses the language of dreams; years can pass in a second, and you can hop from one place to another. It’s a language made of images.”

— Federico Fellini

Movies have shown us a piece of the future, sometimes fun and others, dark and terrifying. Nevertheless, we have to recognize they have been the source of the technology we use today.

Let’s hope that when we go to the cinema next time, searching for inspiration, we also learn the consequences they might bring.

It’s in our hands to create a world full of gadgets to help our daily work, like the Jetsons, or destroy our planet and end living with no resources and future for our grandchildren.

And hope that if there are other beings in the universe wishing to contact us, they are like “ET” and not like “Predator” or “Alien.”