The year 2025: It certainly has that futuristic ring, doesn’t it? Not round enough to come across overly tidy, not odd enough to appear chosen at random, 2025 sounds like a clear interval: a turning point, a historical marker or possibly a deadline. It could well turn out to be any or all of those things, though the outlook feels less futuristically ambiguous than anti-futuristically bleak at the moment.
Is there a chance that humanity can back away from frighteningly destructive and relentless wars, rollbacks of human rights, and insistence on having some kind of debate about what kind of medical care works (vaccines) and doesn’t (denying people medical coverage)? It seems unlikely, and even the oddball soothsayers of cinema have a little trouble with this question, because for whatever reason the movies with major events keyed to 2025 have a secondhand quality, whether that’s in megabudget blockbusters of recent history or energetic schlock from earlier on. (Anyway, there’s less difference between the two than the blockbuster-makers would have you believe.) Let’s take a look at the citizens of cinema’s 2025 and see what lessons we might be able to extract from them.
Future Hunters and Pacific Rim
For some reason, the 2025-set movies featuring apocalyptic (or apocalypse-adjacent) societies typically seen in sci-fi depictions of once-far-flung years have tended toward the, ah, previously owned, to borrow a euphemism from the days of secondhand DVD sales at Blockbuster. Perhaps the most amusingly knocked-off 2025 imaginable emerges in the opening moments of the 1986 sci-fi action flick Future Hunters, where we meet a leather-clad, power-driving loner of a barren desert landscape named Matthew. Yes, he drives crazy – almost like some sort of Mad Matt! Alas, Future Hunters only stays in 2025 for 10 minutes or so; Mad Matt obtains a spear that allows him to travel through time, back to 1986, where he briefly gets to experience ripping off The Terminator before he’s killed by a non-futuristic biker gang. Matt was hoping to prevent a nuclear holocaust, a task he passes on to the enthusiastic Michelle (Linda Carol) and her reluctant boyfriend Slade (Robert Patrick – the T-1000 himself, five years before Terminator 2!), who then go on an Indiana Jones-style globetrotting adventure for another artefact that can destroy the powerful spear and stop the apocalypse.
Cheap and ridiculous as it is, the film does offer something admirably close to genuinely nonstop action: the vast majority of its running time consists of gunshots, running and so many loudly foley-assisted punches, as our heroes elude bikers, Nazis (one of those 80s bits that accidentally feels more timely today), Amazonians and more. Perhaps its most accidentally poignant moment is when, in the middle of an Indy-style snake-heavy artefact-retrieval climax, Slade asks Michelle offhandedly: “Do you really think this will save the future?” Rather than his usual irritable, he sounds genuinely searching, as if momentarily breaking out of a spell that allowed him to just assume that deeply silly action heroics could avert a global catastrophe.
Pacific Rim, on the other hand, never loses faith in the power of deeply silly action heroics. It’s a statelier and more expensive knockoff: future Oscar-winner Guillermo del Toro paying homage to kaiju movies with his story of partner-operated giant robots used to combat Godzilla-like creatures that have emerged from an ocean portal to menace the world. Countries of the world must pull together, then, to stop the monsters once and for all, with little thought given to the petty bickering of international borders. Does this portend an era of international cooperation to fight greater existential threats like, say, genocide and climate change? Are we, like Stacker Pentecost (Idris Elba), “canceling the apocalypse”? Or, more likely, will gigantic hellbeasts emerge from the briny deep and be greeted by a collective shrug that nothing can be done to bridge the partisan divide they’ve created?
Repo Men
This forgotten 2010-made, 2025-set dystopia story is sci-fi by way of Monty Python – specifically, the bit in Monty Python’s The Meaning of Life where paramedics forcibly remove a man’s “donated” liver well before his death. If the film finds this funny, it’s in an even-grimmer register, portraying a future in which organ transplants are easier to come by than ever before, thanks to synthetic tech – which also makes vital organs subject to the same outrageous financial gouging as any number of other modern luxuries, meaning that a repo man (like our not-exactly-hero Jude Law) can neatly remove important parts and leave you for dead just for non-payment. It doesn’t take a trenchant wit or deep imagination to critique the broken US healthcare system and the economic havoc it can wreak upon the insured and uninsured alike, but Repo Men, based on a 2009 novel, certainly finds a nasty yet eminently believable way into addressing those issues. The violence of the repo men’s encounters (and the Law character’s radicalization when he himself must get a heart transplant) brings to mind the recent United Healthcare CEO assassination, and the sentiment that the insurance industry is its own form of violence begetting a more traditional retaliation. The question of 2025 may become, who strikes next?
Thor: Love & Thunder and Black Panther: Wakanda Forever
The most widely seen 2025 movies don’t exactly scan as glimpses into the future; they’re a pair of high-grossing, somewhat ill-regarded Marvel sequels that both debuted in 2022. Somehow, that seems fitting for the potentially dwindling art of the cinematic future-gazing: Thor 4 and Black Panther 2 both take place in 2025 not for any particular thematic or futuristic concerns, but because the already-wonky Marvel Cinematic Universe timeline needs to account for a five-year “blip” that it mostly didn’t want to depict, but did want to appropriate to give an immediate undoing of a big dramatic development (half the universe’s population disappearing in a snap) greater emotional gravity.
It does provide an accidentally handy metaphor for big-budget film-making, though: what started as a relatively grounded take on superheroes with movies like the early Iron Man and Captain America adventures is now so self-reflexive, self-contained and divorced from any kind of genuine emotional reality that recent history must be entirely skipped over, erased and overwritten – and not necessarily with the kind of expansive, visually arresting world-building seen in the best sci-fi and fantasy films. I’m all for escapism (and probably enjoyed Thor 4 more than most people) but I wonder if that drift from reality is why multiple deaths of leading characters in each of these movies felt especially tricky to navigate, narratively speaking – especially, of course, the real-life passing of the Black Panther star Chadwick Boseman. These movies’ alternate versions of 2025 suggests a blockbuster-industrial complex too big for our real lives, but too small for genuine imagination. It’s a future glimpse devoid of dystopia not as a statement, but as a form of pacification.