Portraying what we imagine the future would be like in movies isn’t uncommon. We have fear-the-robots or post-apocalypse movies like Terminator, Snowpiercer, Book of Eli and The Matrix, to name a few. Then, we have dooms-day movies like 2012. I mean, who would have thought we’d survive 2012, right?
But one of the most popular movie series about the future is probably Back to the Future (B2TF) set in 1985. Marty McFly went back to 1955 in the first series by accident and had to rectify the change in the course of events caused by his appearance in the past.
B2TF II sees Marty McFly going to the future to save his kids and must repeat his visit to 1955 to prevent the future Biff, the ‘bad guy,’ from interfering with history and all without running into his other self from his previous trip to 1955. Easy, right?
The most interesting part, and the main highlight for our Throwback Thursday, is Marty arrived at the future on 21 October 2015. That’s 6 days from now! So, have the movie series predicted correctly what 2015 would look like?
For one thing, we’re still using fossil fuels, not the fusion reactor Doc Brown used on his DeLorean, and we’re definitely not seeing any cars flying around in this haze. Clean energy cars are expensive and we can’t just chuck garbage into the engine to fire it up. Besides,engineers are somehow more interested in making cars drive itself rather than making it fly.
Instead of a hoverboard, we see young people, and not so young people, monoeuvering an oxboard and it ain’t fast. We also don’t have self-tying shoes because velcros don’t count!
Nevertheless, B2TF might be right about the Cubs winning the World Series Championship 2015 with the underdog team’s win on Tuesday, getting them a step closer to their first triumph since 1908. But I don’t think we’ll be seeing the news in holographic display any time soon.
Otherwise, as Michael J Fox and Christopher Lloyd pointed out in a video ad by Toyota, the film did get some of it right. For example, fingerprint scanner, video chat, tablets and smart glasses to watch TV or answer calls.
In hindsight, the writer of B2TF probably should have given it more than 30 years for us to catch up to his vision of the future.
As we get closer to D-Day, more and more fans are coming out with parody videos about the film. I might spend my Wednesday night watching a marathon of the B2TF movies but meanwhile, check out this funny parody by CollegeHumour to see what 1985 Marty McFly would think of today 2015.
