5 Sci-Fi Movies From The ’70s That Predicted The Future

The 1970s were a time of great scientific leaps forward thanks to projects such as the Voyager space exploration program and various advances in laser technology and medical scanning. Even the decade’s sci-fi storytelling was pretty bold. As technology and science advanced, fears about what might come from these new developments began to surface in science fiction cinema, and unfortunately, some of these fears have since been validated.

Fictional media have traditionally been fairly reliable at predicting the future, with the exception of science fiction films, which have received little attention. also imaginary. However, there were some 1970s films directed by giants of the genre, including George Lucas, Stanley Kubrick, and Michael Crichton. In fact, by looking at the societal and technological concerns of the time, the screenwriters and directors behind these films were able to predict the future with alarming accuracy. With that in mind, here are five of the best sci-fi films of the 1970s that manage to predict our present.

Based on Ira Levin’s novel of the same name, The Stepford Wives focuses on Joanna Eberhart (Catherine Ross), a woman who moves with her husband and children from New York City to the Stepford community in Connecticut. However, once she gets there, she realizes that she doesn’t really fit in with the other women, many of whom are completely submissive to their husbands. It turns out that Stepford men are replacing their wives with robotic replicas in order to have “perfect” wives, and get rid of the human versions. The Stepford Wives is a genre of feminist science fiction that has inspired a slew of twists on the formula (among them Olivia Wilde’s Don’t Worry Darling and Drew Hancock’s Mate), all of which examine how men (generally cisgender and heterosexual) can control their partners through technological means.

Unfortunately, there are a few ways that “The Stepford Wives” feels a little too real. There’s the fairly obvious example of men replacing human partners with AI chat buddies and choosing artificial relationships over real ones, but there’s also the simple fact that if you have a uterus, your body doesn’t really belong to you, at least according to the US government. It’s a shame that The Stepford Wives lost its relevance for a while only to come back stronger than before – it’s an amazing story, but one day, I hope, it will be pure fiction.

Before writer-director George Lucas became famous for creating the “Star Wars” franchise and taking us all to a galaxy far, far away, he wrote and directed a thought-provoking dystopian film called “THX 1138.” The film stars Robert Duvall as THX 1138, who lives in a future where people are anonymous drones working in a massive corporate machine. Sex is forbidden, and the workforce is kept compliant through the mandatory use of psychoactive drugs to keep them docile and drugged. When THX stops taking his medication and begins to see the problems in such a system, his life is changed forever, and he begins to see the true horrors that keep the system in place. Some of the film’s anti-authoritarian ideas might make their way into a more popular Star Wars film, but this bleak first film from Lucas was too much for most audiences.

These days, it’s not too hard to see parallels between the nightmarish world of “THX 1138” and the world of corporate America, where warehouse, factory and field workers are treated like inhumane cogs in a machine with minimal breaks and ridiculously little incentives to keep going. Many of the wage laborers use drugs to get by (or to work double and triple shifts), creating a world in which Lucas’ sci-fi film truly predicted the future.

This is a minor cheat because, frankly, both Westworld and Futureworld operate in the same universe and predict the same atrocities, and both were released in the 1970s. “Westworld” is written and directed by acclaimed sci-fi author Michael Crichton and centers around a sci-fi theme park, a place where advanced artificial beings are treated as disposable toy pieces for use by human visitors. “Futureworld” then goes on to reveal that there are other such parks, one of which is run by robots, with human clones working for them. Oh, and the company that runs the parks? They use bots to log information about visitors, for both basic capitalist reasons and more nefarious reasons.

Although we don’t have fully conscious AI robots in parks yet, humans treating AI creations as disposable is nothing new. Not only that, but as we get closer and closer to actual artificial feeling, we’re getting closer to AI creations that fight back (and not just Chat GPT that tells users terrible things). Oh, and the issue of “spying on your park visitors with technology” is about as relevant as it gets, as companies monitor our every move in the real world and digitally so they can better target ads. HBO’s “Westworld” series delved into these ideas as well (and did a better job of them), but both “Westworld” and “Futureworld” manage to anticipate something of our contemporary corporate espionage.

“Andromeda,” directed by Robert Wise and based on Michael Crichton’s novel of the same name, follows a group of scientists, doctors and nurses as they attempt to contain and control infectious pathogens from outer space. Fortunately, to our knowledge, we have not had to deal with any extraterrestrial pathogens making people sick, although many pathogens on our planet have done just that. Seeing scientists working together to try to stop the disease is very similar to what happened when doctors and scientists teamed up in real life to try to prevent the spread of the COVID-19 virus and create a vaccine as quickly as possible, albeit with much less quarantine.

“Andromeda” is pretty dry science stuff, but it’s a bit more interesting when you can compare it to real life. Science can save us just as easily as it can hurt us, so hopefully we’ll get more science fiction stories that predict positive outcomes in the future (even if Andromeda’s ending isn’t the most optimistic ending in the world).

Both Stanley Kubrick’s 1971 film A Clockwork Orange and the 1962 Anthony Burgess novel on which it was based generated an incredible amount of controversy, with concerns about copycat crimes and intense sexual violence in the film version leading to the film being banned in a number of countries, including Great Britain. “A Clockwork Orange” is set in a dystopian future under totalitarian rule. The elderly never leave their homes and spend their days wasting them watching TV, while the young people are all breaking the law and creating chaos. Such is the case with Alex (Malcolm McDowell) and his gang of goons, who spend their days invading homes, committing sexual assaults, brutally attacking homeless people, and more.

However, when Alex is arrested and accused of his crimes, he is subjected to a form of brainwashing torture to try to convince him to change. Of course, he is not truly “healed” by the procedure in Kubrick’s A Clockwork Orange; He simply learns how to pretend to act for the regime so that he can commit his crimes in secret. (In the original book, Alex was actually reformed through reprogramming, although this chapter was generally removed upon the novel’s initial US release based on the assumption that American readers would not buy that ending.)

“A Clockwork Orange” is a scathing indictment of the prison system and the failure of punishment as a means of rehabilitation. Millions of people in the United States are or have been in prison, and the nation itself has the highest incarceration rate in the world, creating more criminals through a failed system. And while no one is drinking Moloko Plus yet, just give it time.