10 Films That Creepily Predicted 2016’s Biggest Moments

The flying cars of Blade Runner and the lifelike androids of Alien might still be the stuff of dreams, but other movies have a funny way of predicting the future. Whether film directors and scriptwriters are psychic, imaginative or simply full of wishful thinking, many movies have foretold the future with eerie accuracy.

Just think of the driverless cars from 1990 Arnie action flick Total Recall, a reality today with projects like Google’s self-driving car prototypes, or 1995 cyber thriller The Net’s prediction of online pizza ordering – not quite as amazing an invention as the autonomous car, but a godsend nevertheless.

Looking at some of the biggest events of 2016 – the year of Brexit, the craziest election in US history and a ridiculous number of celebrity deaths – it seems Hollywood too had a unique insight into what this year was going to throw at us too. If only we’d paid a little more attention …

In early July this year, NASA’s Juno space probe successfully entered Jupiter’s orbit following a five-year voyage to our solar system’s biggest planet. For the next year or so, Juno will collect information on Jupiter’s gravity and magnetic fields, composition and the presence of water and transmit it back to NASA bigwigs so they can gain a better understanding of the origin and evolution of the planet.

After its mission is complete, Juno will be ‘deorbited’ which is basically nice NASA speak for the probe falling into Jupiter’s atmosphere where it will disintegrate and burn up. Nice one NASA, but we’re afraid director Stanley Kubrick already made it to Jupiter years ago if only in his imagination.

Kubrick’s definitive sci-fi film 2001: A Space Odyssey, centring on a team of scientists aboard a spacecraft bound for Jupiter, came out almost 50 years before Juno made it to the planet’s orbit. This is science fiction naturally, so Kubrick’s mission was manned by humans and a creepily sentient computer named HAL which is a tad beyond NASA’s technological capabilities at the moment, but it’s nevertheless a prescient prediction from the late, great filmmaker.

Given that Kubrick and his movie have been credited with predicting other futuristic shizzle too, from flat-screen monitors to tablet computers, it’s not too surprising their mission to Jupiter would eventually come true too.