I love science fiction movies for lots of reasons, but the biggest draw is, of course, that sci-fi speculates about how science and technology will change the world. Sometimes it’s a prediction of how technology that will certainly exist could change things. Other times, technology itself is a product of pure imagination.
However, here in the real world, scientists and engineers never sleep, and sometimes it’s science fiction itself that inspires them. Thanks to so many advances over the past few decades, some movies that were sci-fi as recently as the 1980s have now come true, at least in part.
This is not a ranked list of films, but simply a list of personal favorites that I think have at least some elements that have left the world of fiction, and are now a reality.
8
2001: A Space Odyssey
Release Year
1968
Runtime
2 hours 29 minutes
It didn’t take long for 2001: A Space Odyssey to at least partly exit the realm of sci-fi. It happened the year after the film came out! As soon as Neil Armstrong set foot on Luna, the movie didn’t seem so far-fetched! In the decades since, we’ve hit some other milestones, though 2001 is far in the rear view mirror, and we certainly haven’t hit them all.
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One of the major stars of the movie, HAL9000, only recently started to feel like a reality in our world. Modern AI chatbots like ChatGPT can indeed speak to us and seemingly understand what we say. It can look at the world through a camera lens and make sense of it. While we have no idea if or when we’ll achieve true sentient AI, there’s no reason to think that HAL 9000 in the movie was sentient at all, and today’s best AI systems don’t feel that far off.
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Another element that’s now coming true is that AI systems will have to make life-or-death decisions, just as HAL did in the film when the mission was under threat. Whether it’s a military system or just a self-driving car, at some point a computer program will have to decide who lives and who dies—scary stuff!
7
Her
Release Year
2013
Runtime
2 hours 6 minutes
This is one movie that hits very differently in the 2020s versus when it came out in 2013. Spike Jonze’s movie about a guy who falls in love with his phone’s voice assistant absolutely felt like far-off sci-fi when it came out, but now it’s actually happening. There are numerous stories on the web about people who are forming friendships and romantic relationships with AI software.
What this means in the long run is anyone’s guess, but I only see this sort of thing becoming more common. It could help with the so-called loneliness epidemic, or it could harm people psychologically, but only time will tell.
6
Gattaca
Release Year
1997
Runtime
1 hour 46 minutes
When Gattaca came out in 1997, the idea that anyone could get their DNA analyzed was ludicrous. It was too expensive, and what would you even do with the information? Today, you can send off a sample to a company who will profile your DNA for a few hundred bucks, and tell you more about yourself than you probably wanted to know.
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We aren’t quite at the point where our social opportunities are determined by our genes, but I’m pretty confident genetics are going to play a much bigger part in our lives going ahead in this century than ever before. Gattaca doesn’t touch on the idea of genetic engineering much, but we might actually spend a lot of time editing the genes of people who have already been born and our children, which might lead to the same sort of social class system on display in this film.
5
Minority Report
Release Year
2002
Runtime
2 hours 25 minutes
There is really only one thing in Minority Report that hasn’t come true— the use of psychic humans to predict the future. Pretty much everything else on the checklist is there. We have those motion-controlled computer interfaces back with the release of the Xbox Kinect, and we still have them today with devices like the Meta Quest.
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We’re also at the beginning of robotic drones absolutely taking over everything, and you see them all over this film. However, when it comes to the main gimmick of the movie—predicting crime—we’re further along than you might think. Law enforcement is leaning heavily into predictive algorithms, facial recognition, gait analysis, and all sorts of software and hardware tricks might one day become so accurate that it could know you’re likely to commit a crime based on your social media activity, personal information, and body language.
4
Back to the Future Part II
Release Year
1989
Runtime
1 hours 48 minutes
We don’t have in-home cold fusion yet, no hoverboards, and flying cars will never be a thing, but flat-screen displays, wearable tech, hands-free video games, video calling, and biometric door locks are all just normal for us now. The movie even predicted our nostalgia for the 80s.
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I’m just waiting for the double parallel tie to come into fashion, and we’re all set.
3
The Truman Show
Release Year
1998
Runtime
1 hour 43 minutes
The Truman Show now feels more prophetic than outlandish. The big difference between reality and the movie is that we know we’re being watched all the time. In fact, people have started to live performative lives on social media, and don’t seem to have much of an issue that giant companies know everything about the most intimate parts of their lives. Just like Truman, those companies use their surveillance of us to turn a profit, but at least he was blissfully unaware that it was happening.
2
Blade Runner
Release Year
1982
Runtime
1 hour 57 minutes
Blade Runner might seem like one movie that doesn’t belong on this list, but if you look past its slick aesthetic, and break down the core things it predicted for our future in the distant year of 2019, then there’s more of Blade Runner in our reality than you might realize.
Climate collapse, mega-corporations being a law unto themselves, the rise of human-like robots and AI, and genetic engineering of artificial life? Check, check, and check.
The aesthetics of reality might not look like Blade Runner, but many of the key elements are in our near future or already in our past. The key technologies that you’d need to build a true replicant aren’t that far off either!
1
Demolition Man
Release Year
1993
Runtime
1 hour 55 minutes
On the surface, Demolition Man is a loud, goofy action movie. But dig deeper, and the satire looks suspiciously like real life. A world sanitized of risk, politically overcorrected to the point of absurdity, and micromanaged by algorithmic governance? We’re partway there.
Self-driving cars, virtual meetings, personalized ads, restaurant monopolies, and even pandemic-era isolation echo the movie’s more absurd ideas. And yes, contactless everything is basically the three-seashell joke come true. You laugh—then you realize you haven’t touched cash in years!
The only thing we don’t have is a man-portable laser rifle, but you can bet someone, somewhere, is working on just that.
The real question is which of the sci-fi movies of today will turn out to be more real than we thought a decade or three from now?
