This is Post 5 of 6 this afternoon; books you’re reading, TV series or movies you’re watching, and films set in 2022 are the topic, here!
Exclusively on Zoom, we’ll be asking “What Are You Reading (or Watching)?” Give us your quick book report, or your brief review of a film or TV show you’ve recently been enjoying!
And for those not taking part on Zoom today, we list the following handful of genre movies set in 2022! How many have you seen?
10) SCI-FI MOVIES SET IN 2022
The Purge (2013)
Ethan Hawke, Lena Headey, Max Burkholder, Adelaide Kane, Arija Bareikis, Edwin Hodge; James DeMonaco, director
We begin with the most recent of our listed films, an action/horror/thriller about an affluent family equipping themselves to wait out “The Purge,” an annual government-sanctioned night of lawlessness. During the overnight hours in which the Purge is in effect, all crime is legal, including murder, and emergency services are suspended.
We learn that in 2014, the New Founding Fathers, a novel authoritarian political party, come to power in America in the wake of an economic collapse. The Fathers institute the Purge, and because of this and other of their policies, by 2022, the year in which the film is set, America is said to be practically free of crime and posting an unemployment rate of merely one percent.
The film details their travails throughout the night, beginning with the arrival on their doorstep of a bloodied black man seeking refuge and culminating with this same man saving them from their own neighbours, who had intended to execute the family. In between, there’s a lot bloodshed, a gang of masked Purgers threatening from outside, and more bloodshed!
The Purge comes to an end the following morning and those who survived return to their normal lives as television newscasters tout this as the most successful Purge to date, reporting on a stock market boom due to increased sales of weapons and security systems. A man’s voice is heard poignantly speaking of the loss of his sons, and his own loss of patriotism as a result.
The Purge scored well at the box office and spawned a successful film franchise but many critics found the movie implausible, a clichéd slasher flick attempting thoughtful social allegory, and merely a political screed disguised as a bloody home-invasion thriller.
Really? Well, just you snooty critics wait until next year’s Purge!
No Escape (1994)
Ray Liotta, Lance Henriksen, Stuart Wilson, Kevin Dillon, Ernie Hudson; Martin Campbell, director
In a dystopian 2022, corrupt corporations run a global penal system, from which there is no escape save death. Former marine captain J. T. Robbins is serving a life sentence for killing his commanding officer, who had ordered him to murder innocent civilians in Benghazi, an order Robbins refused.
After locking horns with the warden, a rebellious Robbins finds himself transferred to the notorious Absolom, a remote island penal colony reserved for the worst of the worst. There are no walls or guards or rules on Absolom; prisoners are left to fend for themselves. On this island, it’s the Law of the Jungle; survive or die!
Robbins soon learns of the two tribes of convicts inhabiting the island: the Outsiders, savage, cruel, and led by a tyrannical, thuggish chief; and the Insiders, a cooperative group who have established something resembling a civilized society within their fortified compound, and who hope to tap Robbins’ expertise in defending their encampment against Outsider attack. Caught between the two warring factions, Robbins has his own agenda: escape from Absolom, a feat no inmate has ever managed.
Lance Henriksen plays the Father, leader of the Insiders, and SF film fans will certainly recognize him as Vukovich, one of the LAPD cops in Terminator (1984), and as the android Bishop in Aliens (1986), both of these films written and directed by James Cameron. Ernie Hudson, meanwhile, is instantly identifiable as a ghostbuster!
No Escape garnered mixed reviews and was released in some jurisdictions under the titles Escape from Absolom, and Absolom 2022.
Alien Intruder (1993)
Billy Dee Williams, Jeff Conaway, Maxwell Caulfield, Tracy Scoggins; Ricardo Jacques Gale, director
Convicts are promised commuted sentences should they agree to join a mission to find a lost spaceship aboard which an astronaut has inexplicably slaughtered his crewmates, but they fall victim to a virtual-reality femme fatale who sets the men against each other. Apparently, a sexy alien temptress has infiltrated their ship’s VR entertainment system… Or something.
Amounting to a poorly executed, soft-core sci-fi skin flick, too much of what could have been an interesting space-age update of Ulysses’ encounter with the sirens in Homer’s Odyssey comes across as silly and stupid. The special effects are pretty clunky, too. We’ve included Alien Intruder, here, because it’s set in 2022!
Billy Dee “Lando Calrissian” Williams was slumming.
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Time Runner (1993)
Mark Hamill, Rae Dawn Chong, Brion James, Mark Baur; Michael Mazo, director
With Earth under alien attack in 2022, fighter pilot Michael Raynor is humanity’s last hope for survival. Blasted through a time warp, he emerges in the year 1992. His mission: change the past and save the future. But alien sleeper agents are waiting there to prevent him from succeeding and ensure their victory in 2022, among them Karen Donaldson, the scientist in whom Raynor had placed his trust!
Upon release, this flick was near-universally panned by critics and fans, alike. “Plenty of gunfire and what-are-we-gonna-do-now?” dialogue fills up the movie’s runtime, said EW.com.
It seems, then, that 1993 was not a good year for Star Wars actors to appear in sci-fi movies outside of the franchise that made them famous.
Mark “Luke Skywalker” Hamill was slumming.
The Dark Side of the Moon (1990)
Robert Sampson, Will Bledsoe, Joe Turkel, Camilla More, John Diehl, Wendy MacDonald; D. J. Webster, director
In the year 2022, a maintenance vessel engaged in the repair of an orbital weapons platform suddenly experiences a baffling power failure and the crew find themselves drifting towards the dark side of moon. With oxygen running out, the stricken ship comes across an old, derelict NASA space shuttle, Discovery, which we learn splashed down in the Bermuda Triangle and disappeared years ago! Hoping to salvage supplies which might help extricate them from their predicament, the crew board the shuttle, only to face a murderously malevolent force—none other than the devil himself!
The film, a low-budget, straight-to-video release—often a red flag—nevertheless received generally favourable reviews, praised for its atmospherically spooky moments and excellent cast, but cited for throwing a tad too much jetsam into the plot, from the Book of Revelation to the Bermuda Triangle.
Screenwriting brothers Carey and Chad Hayes, who went on to script the House of Wax remake (2005) and The Conjuring (2013), can be credited, we suppose, for anticipating that by 2022, the space shuttle program would have concluded, but they did overestimate the degree to which space flight would advance.
Genre fans might recognize prolific character actor Joe Turkel, who played Dr. Eldon Tyrell in Blade Runner (1982) and ghostly bartender Lloyd in The Shining (1980). He retired in 1998; Dark Side of the Moon was his last feature film.
Discovery, meanwhile, the most travelled of the shuttle fleet, after 27 illustrious years of service, was decommissioned in 2011 and today is on display at the Steven F. Udvar-Hazy Center of the Smithsonian Institution’s National Air and Space Museum. Not lost somewhere in the churning fog of the Bermuda Triangle!
Soylent Green (1973)
Charlton Heston, Leigh Taylor-Young, Chuck Connors, Joseph Cotton, Brock Peters, Paula Kelly, Edward G. Robinson; Richard Fleischer, director
Based on Make Room, Make Room, Harry Harrison’s 1966 novel of overpopulation and depleted resources, this fusion of police procedural with science fiction is the oldest and most prestigious of the films we’ve listed, here.
In 2022, overpopulation, pollution, and a climate catastrophe have cumulatively left the world short of food, clean water, and housing—not so far off the mark on the prescience scale for a film produced just shy of 50 years ago!
Only society’s wealthy elite can afford natural foodstuffs and spacious apartments high above the teeming and dangerous streets of an overcrowded New York City. In one memorable scene, we learn that strawberry jam is a luxury at $150 per jar!
NYPD detective Frank Thorn investigates the case of a high-placed business executive’s apparent murder. The deceased had been on the board of the Soylent Corporation, producers of half the world’s food supply in the form of tiny wafers, including Soylent Red, Soylent Yellow, and their latest, Soylent Green, said to be made from ocean plankton and advertised as the most nutritious of the line. But Soylent Green is in short supply and rioting often breaks out in the streets when local stocks run out due to distribution bottlenecks and famished multitudes are turned away.
Thorn suspects not a simple murder, however, but an assassination and doggedly pursues the case, aided by his elderly roommate, Sol Roth, a former college professor and police analyst. The mystery is unraveled over the course of the film, culminating in a discovery so shocking that a shaken Roth opts for assisted suicide at a government clinic and Thorn witnesses, first hand, the horrifying secret behind Soylent Green. His closing utterance is one of science fiction cinema’s most unforgettable lines.
Soylent Green was conferred a Saturn Award as the year’s best science fiction film, and a Nebula for its script.
The picture was Edward G. Robinson’s 101st and final film. The ailing Hollywood legend died of bladder cancer just a couple of weeks after filming wrapped. Roth’s death scene was the last he filmed.