Movies and TV shows set in the future have imagined a variety of backdrops against which to set romances, mysteries, thrillers and adventures. See how they imagine the worlds of tomorrow.
For Minority Report (2002), director Steven Spielberg worked with a team of futurists to make scientific, believable predictions of what an American city of the coming decades might hold. Privacy is a commodity, transport is self-driving, the cars drive up building walls, there are robot trackers, and everything is secured by biometric signature. We’re already halfway there. (Courtesy Dreamworks Pictures)
2/11
Many believe the 2015 film Tomorrowland was ahead of its time. But the city of huge robots and steel buildings and a sinister sense of always being watched, is familiar. Could innovators from the past and the present work together so mankind can have a future? And could that future be a comfortable one for all kinds of people? (Courtesy Walt Disney Pictures)
3/11
The city of Back To The Future II (1989) is the one most ordinary folks want – a world that looks like it has been stuck in the 1980s but comes with all kinds of useful gizmos. There are floating hoverboards, self-lacing shoes, cool fast cars, digital window views, and endless sequels to Jaws. Great Scott!(Courtesy Universal Pictures)
The Fifth Element released in 1997 but it’s still a good way to dream about what our lives might look like in the decades to come. Of course, there are flying taxis, self-making beds, shuttles to resort islands in outer space and a multi-pass to access it all. And finally, we’ll have found aliens and found ways to live with them too.(Courtesy Columbia Pictures)
5/11
The ideal, running-like-clockwork city of Bregna in Aeon Flux (2005) surely must he hiding something. Pregnant women keep disappearing. And it is up to a warrior to find out what’s keeping mankind going. Spoiler alert: It has something to do with recycling human DNA.(Dreamworks Pictures)
10
Modus Vivendi (1000 people – 1000 Homes), 2000: In this self-portrait, a work of mixed media on canvas, Kallat appears as a swaggering, bespectacled juggler of heart and brain. The painting is an exploration of selfhood in the city of Mumbai, where he grew up and lives. The individual, lost in the multitudes, wanders in a state of perpetual disorientation, as reflected in the work. The radiating streaks of red, orange and green, reminiscent of thermal imagery, were achieved by texturing the canvas with layers of paint or canvas and then peeling off some parts to attain the desired visual effect.
5
Sheer delight: While out surveying the remote Phoenix Islands Archipelago, Schmidt Ocean Institute scientists captured rare footage of a “glass octopus”, named so because it is completely see-through. What one does see when one shines a light on it is its optic nerve, eyeballs, and digestive tract. Even though this species has been known to science since 1918, scientists were forced to study about this animal through specimens found in the guts of predators, before this sighting.
7
Herald / Harbinger is a permanent public art installation by Ben Rubin and Jer Thorp. It broadcasts the sounds of the Bow Glacier cracking and breaking 200 km away, to the centre of Calgary, one of Canada’s largest cities, almost in real time. The sounds and imagery shaped by data from a glacial observatory are broadcast through 16 speakers and seven LED arrays.
10
Everything Everywhere All At Once (2022): The movie explores the many dimensions of parenthood and love through the story of a Chinese-American immigrant named Evelyn Wang (played by Michelle Yeoh) who, while struggling to run a failing laundromat business, uses her newfound powers to travel across multiple realities to save the world and work on her strained relationships with her loved ones. It’s a family drama that’s fast-paced, funny and, above all, tackles earnestly the idea of healing from intergenerational trauma.
6
At first sight: For centuries, sunspots were thought to be Mercury passing across the Sun. By the early 17th century, with the invention of the telescope, astronomers could get a clearer look. In 1610, Galileo Galilei (who first used the telescope to observe space) in Italy and his British contemporary Thomas Harriot identified these as spots on the Sun. Seen here are 35 drawings of sunspots created by Galileo between June 2 and July 8, 1612.
