Future doesn’t look too bright — in the movies

The future isn’t what it used to be, especially at the movies.

In Alfonso Cuaron’s new thriller, “Children of Men,” mankind cannot reproduce and faces extinction — and it’s only 2027. It sounds pretty bleak, though the film approaches the subject of population growth and threatened reproduction from a perspective that’s rather different from the grim speculative thrillers of the past.

“Zero Population Growth” (1971), for instance, dealt with the outlawing of new babies and the execution of those who dared to be parents. In “Wild in the Streets” (1968), 30-year-olds were sent to concentration camps. They were simply eliminated in “Logan’s Run” (1976). In “Soylent Green” (1973), people were turned into food in an overcrowded metropolis. In “The Omega Man” (1971), most citizens had become zombies.

For non-stop despair in science-fiction movies, it was hard to beat the late 1960s/early 1970s. No wonder audiences were more than ready for the exuberance of “Star Wars” when it arrived in 1977.

Still, Cassandra-like warnings were there almost from the beginning. The first great science-fiction film, Fritz Lang’s prophetic “Metropolis” (1926), imagines a 21^st Century city in which the wealthy classes dally in skyscrapers while slave-like workers toil underground. The exciting visuals were inspired by the New York skyline, and the ending attempted to be optimistic, but it’s hard to forget the dehumanizing oppressiveness of the social arrangement and the zombie-like behavior of the working class.

A decade later, H.G. Wells’ stories served as the basis for “Things to Come” (1936), in which a seemingly endless world war leads to a dubious declaration of peace, and “The Man Who Could Work Miracles” (1936), about a British shop clerk (Roland Young) who is given the power to do whatever he wishes. At first he’s content to perform magic tricks, but when he grows ambitious, setting himself up as a monarch and trying to alter the future, his carelessly invented “perfect” world collapses.

The post-Hiroshima world
The bombing of Hiroshima and Nagasaki inspired a series of 1950s movies in which the survivors of nuclear blasts either live tortured lives or succumb to radiation sickness. The most uncompromising was Stanley Kramer’s “On the Beach” (1959), in which the entire all-star cast dies. Waiting for the end in Australia (the last country to be hit by nuclear fallout) were Gregory Peck, Ava Gardner, Anthony Perkins and Fred Astaire as a scientist who tries to explain what happened. In the most haunting sequence, Peck’s nuclear submarine visits a deserted San Francisco, and one of his men chooses to live his last days there.

At this point a satirical approach was inevitable, and Stanley Kubrick provided it with “Dr. Strangelove or: How I Learned to Stop Worrying and Love the Bomb” (1964). The title says it all. Peter Sellers plays the title role (a mad German scientist) and two other characters (a helpless British officer and the befuddled U.S. President) in this darkly comic vision of the end of the world. “We’ll meet again,” sings a doomsday chorus as mushroom clouds explode all over the globe. And that’s really all, folks.

Peter Watkins’ “The War Game” (1965), which was often shown on double bills with “Strangelove,” was so convincing that it won an Academy Award for best feature-length documentary. The movie is actually pure fiction: an imaginary account of a nuclear attack on a woefully unprepared Great Britain. Watkins continued in this pseudo-documentary vein with equally cheery tales of the future of pop music (1967’s “Privilege”), stripped-down warfare (1969’s “The Gladiators”) and political oppression (1971’s “Punishment Park”).

Fears of an atomic Armageddon also fueled Franklin J. Schaffner’s  “Planet of the Apes” (1968) and Ted Post’s “Beneath the Planet of the Apes” (1970). The former didn’t unveil its concerns until the final sequence: a deeply pessimistic twist ending that many moviegoers saw coming. The sequel, set in nuke-ravaged New York, featured a gang of mutants who create an elaborate ritual in which they worship warheads.

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