Its all in the date

I was just thinking this week that all the great milestones of science fiction and pop culture have passed us by. It started with the late George Orwell reversing the year in which he completed his dark apocalyptic masterpiece 1984 often written Nineteen Eighty-four. We got to 1984 and there was no great war with Oceania or rats in cages attached to Winston Smith’s face (though Big Brother and torture did seem surreally relevant in the sudden invasion of Iraq and the Gitmo/ Abu Graib tortures but that’s for another blog). From then the dates fell away like sheets stripped from a yellowing calendar. It was October 16, 1997 and the Jupiter 2 carrying Earth’s first family into space (along with its most flaming charlatan, his robot boyfriend and their adoptive and precocious ward—which gave us one of the most iconic television phrases ever “Danger Will Robinson!”) blasted off only to be Lost in Space. Obviously nobody asked Dr. Smith and he certainly would never tell.

Then there was the Grand Trilogy of early 80s sci-fi movies with twisty plots, hot ballsy women and straight up hardcore violence: Escape from New York (1981), Blade Runner (1982) and The Terminator (1984).

I still remember seeing the poster for Escape from New York when I went to see the movie at Hanes Mall Cinema IV—yes Junior a theater with 4 screens and not 50 was a big deal then. The poster showed the destroyed head of the Statue of Liberty with the caption reading: In 1997, when the US President crashes into Manhattan, now a giant maximum security prison, a convicted bank robber is sent in for a rescue. When this movie was released, New York City was sandwhiched between the catastrophic economic collapse of the Drop Dead 70s and the apocalyptic obliteration of the cracked-out New Jack City era. Even though it was only 16 years away, at the rate of decay it wasn't a far fetched concept that NYC would likely be a prison by the late 90s. Kurt Russell was at his badass zenith at that time. Shedding his Disney framework and going from Jungle Boy on Gilligan’s Island to the magnificent MoFoness of Snake Plissken right before our eyes. Remember the green and black wireframe CGI of New York City! We were all amazed. This was movie magic at its best.

Three years later a god came to earth swaddled in leather and attitude. The juggernaut known as Arnold Schwarzenegger bore down on the American psyche like no villain had done before. Norman Bates’ demure horror or the sheer scope of the psychopathic nuttiness of Travis Bickle had nothing on the T-1. It was a machine sent from the future to kill the mother of humankind’s savior. Imagine a Satan sending a demon to kill the Virgin Mary before she even met Joseph. Technology so unrelenting lethal that only the shark from Jaws could invoke a feeling so visceral. The Terminator unleashed a fury on the world that was unlike anything before. It was originally stated that on August 4, 1997 a computer defense system goes online. 25 days later on August 29, 1997 Skynet (the name still gives me Goosebumps) becomes self-aware and initiates a nuclear strike that all but obliterates the human race. There has yet to be a Skynet, but Google (which was started in 1996) has taken over the internet. Should we worry that Larry Page and Sergey Brin have created the construct that will bring about the death of man and not Miles Dyson?

Ape conquered man in 1991. The nineties must have been seen as a bleak distant future to visionary artists of the past. Roddy McDowall probably became the most famous talking animal supplanting Mr. Ed. In my favorite of the Apes Chronicle movies: Conquest of the Planet of the Apes. Caesar, an intelligent, talking chimpanzee—the offspring of Cornelius and Zira, the ape couple that befriended Charlton Heston in the original Planet of the Apes—grows tired of his people’s slavery (the story goes that in 1983 all cats and dogs died of a disease that left man companionless so we took apes as servants and pets). Caesar starts a non-violent movement of passive resistance that quickly escalates into full-out revolution. The original ending of the movie (before it was sanitized for happiness in which mercy was shown by the ape captors to their former human masters) had Caesar standing on a burning precipice overlooking a mob of orange-jumpsuited gorillas. They had Breck, the cruel white administrator and chief boogieman of Ape Management stretched out and shackled by the horde. MacDonald played by black actor Hari Rhodes begged Caesar for mercy. The film ended with man’s nearest genetic neighbor ripping Breck to shreds. Could you imagine the imagery of a black man and a primate lording over the death of a white former slave master? The bloody American future now theirs to rule. A very potent simulacrum of 1972 mores and to say the least you see why the original ending did not test well.



And speaking of monkeys; what does a black monolith and bone-wielding primates with a murderous streak stir up in your brain? Arthur C. Clarke and Stanley Kubrick (author and film maker) created a movie borne from the crèche of cutting edge special effects. 2001: A Space Odyssey still widens my eyes and sparks my imagination. It was weird and overlong but the sequences for this movie still look good 42 years later. Skylab and the International Space Station not included, humans are nowhere near having a facility on the moon. Or living in some far-flung dimension where we're all warped into an old people living in what looks like a Central Park West classic six with a disco floor and wainscoting. You will notice that I am making little mention of 2010: The Year We Make Contact because it not only didn't have the gravitas or zeitgeist of its former, it was just plain boring. Jupiter turning into a sun. That's what the entire movie was about. Really?

I guess that leaves us with the only milestone left. 2019. The year Blade Runner takes place. Many esteem this to be the greatest sci-fi film ever produced and is considered Ridley Scott’s masterwork. It made the future sexy and violent all at the same time. This future wasn’t the grand pristine intellectually sanitized conquerors we meet in the 50s, who with bold courage brought humanity to the stars. Think Forbidden Planet (RIP Leslie Neilsen) Nor was it the wasteland of squanderers that let apes rule and pollution destroy us. Think Soylent Green is people!! What teenage boy doesn’t remember Joanna Cassidy and her snake, slutty and aggressive running away from Harrison Ford’s Decker in a clear plastic overcoat. At least strippers made it into the future. And with the way our economy is in free fall, the sex trade may be the profession with the highest growth potential. So if Blade Runner is the Holy Grail we only have 8 more years to achieve Philip K. Dick's avant garde vision of the future. Here's the recipe: we need to speed up wrecking our atmosphere so that Southern California is cold, wet and bleak, build some fire-belching factories in the San Fernando Valley and get on the ball with a race of androids that look oddly like Daryl Hannah and Rutger Hauer, that we call replicants. And there better be a Latino-Asian LAPD detective brushing up on his origami even as we speak!