13 Movies That Depressingly Predicted The Future
Long live the new flesh.
At its best, cinema can be one of the most democratic tools in modern society, not merely to entertain, but to educate, inform and even change minds.
Filmmakers routinely use the medium to paint a picture of the future they envision, and while it frequently proves hugely inaccurate in reality (we still don't have flying cars), sometimes those predictions will land terrifyingly on the money.
The minds behind these movies surely could never have guessed how startlingly well-realised their ideas would become in the months and years that followed, sometimes with an amusing level of accuracy, but more often than not, absolutely terrifying above all else.
It's enough to make one consider what recently-released movies have inadvertently conceived of a reality heading our way in the near-future. Was In Time actually an ingeniously prescient sci-fi thriller after all?
Here are 13 movies that depressingly predicted the future...
13. The Surveillance State - Enemy Of The State
Tony Scott's 1998 tech-thriller revolves around the government's increasing reliance on ultra-sophisticated surveillance tech in the interest of the ever-ambiguous "national security".
At the time of the movie's release, the extent of the NSA's surveillance powers depicted in the film (namely using satelite imagery to track suspects in real-time) seemed like pure fantasy, but almost two decades later, it's horrifyingly real.
The 2013 Edward Snowden NSA leaks revealed the extent to which the average American citizen is being monitored, bringing to the surface the very same privacy concerns that Will Smith's protagonist Robert Clayton Dean raised in this movie (remember the infamous "Do you jerk off in the shower?" conversation?).
Hell, Gene Hackman's on-the-run whistle-blower is basically the movie's stand-in for Snowden himself (if you add on about three decades of age, of course).