The Movie 2012 and How the Line of Fiction & Reality in Film is Converging

Hollywood long ago started a fixation on trying to guess the future of mankind under the umbrella of Sci-Fi or in genres not so classifiable. Most of those films had to go the route of the quasi surreal and the downright ridiculous to give an entertaining spin on the future of America or the world at large. And the majority of those movies were made back in particular decades that seemed so far removed from the future, depicting the future had to be exaggerated to be distinguishable with the present. Then there were the rare exceptions; the ones managing to have enough kernels of prescience to make them eerie to watch when we saw them on TV years later. None, however, have ever been able to guess future events in accurate detail, even though the November movie "2012" (starring John Cusack) wants to change all of that.

Whether the film does or not depends on how far Hollywood gets past the line of duplicating the reality of our future as movies have somewhat succeeded in doing more recently. The most recent examples were perhaps just coincidences in guessing the trajectory of humanity, technology or climate change--based merely on obvious hunches. Movies such as "The Truman Show" and "Minority Report" gave us chilling and accurate views of our current state of television and the development of high-end technology, but based on a guessable trajectory for where America was going.

Long before those movies, though, the single biggest unknown depicted in film was getting into space and landing on the moon. While Hollywood did guess we'd get to the moon ten to fifteen years before we went there, the depiction of it was far from accurate, including the technology to get there. Hollywood had our eyes so far into the future of space travel then that anything about the Mayan prophecy of 2012 or future social issues down on Terra Firma weren't even considered.

If you had to hunt for the first movie to depict a metaphorical accuracy to the future of society, the 1960 adaptation of H.G. Wells' "The Time Machine" should get the vote for getting eerier as real time goes on. No, nuclear war didn't happen in 1966 England as the film mistakenly depicted. However, it's the far-flung future with the culture of the Eloi and the Morlocks that have so many haunting connections to our current era. The directions of our world today and the lack of care in increasing knowledge by a younger generation seem to set us up perfectly for the future "The Time Machine" shows us.

The only thing that would stop it from becoming reality would be a divine intervention long before it happens.

Of course, mainstream Hollywood doesn't go there. The exception is the independently-produced Left Behind movie series adaptations that explores the Final Days in Christianity. And the only thing that would come close in mainstream Hollywood would be if the Narnia Chronicles adaptations get completed. There, "The Final Battle" would show metaphor in Aslan/Christ's return to rescue humanity from moral and ecological devastation on the planet.

All disaster films from the Hollywood pipeline, though, are fatalistic. In order to survive, it's nothing but taking matters into your own hands, even if the chances of survival look bleak.
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The stance of the movie "2012" takes this idea and runs with it...literally. Not that anybody can outrun the calamities seen in "2012" when tsunamis and earthquakes happen within biblical proportions. At the heart of the movie is survival of at least some of the human race, be damned the size of the tsunami waves and the massive natural destruction of the earth. It's a philosophy that every disaster movie continues to have, with a general ending of the human race somehow moving on to rebuild civilization. Yet "2012" takes the destruction of our planet to unprecedented levels than we've seen in other disaster movies. It makes this vision of our future too hard to believe.

What we've learned from Hollywood, though, is that subjects tackled in certain films that seem highly improbable end up becoming eerily real years later. When it does happen, the media will cite that particular movie until we start to get the message that movies can sometimes be more unknowingly prescient than anything. One of the most chilling within the last 30 years was "The China Syndrome" in 1979 that predicted the Three Mile Island nuclear plant disaster by a mere twelve days from the film's release date. "2001: A Space Odyssey" doesn't have to be mentioned in being more than a little accurate in predicting our space program. Also, when it comes to technological advancements and sociological issues, any movie adaptation from a Philip K. Dick or Isaac Asimov short story is certain to be reality within ten to twenty years.

For the film "2012", a deep philosophical problem is about to be hatched. Because the film sits on the line between the torturously belabored Mayan prophecy of earth changes starting on Dec. 21, 2012 and the exaggeration of Hollywood, the potential of it being accurate three years from now makes this movie all the more powerful.

Just how would producer and director Roland Emmerich (or any producer/director) deal with the reality if the events all came true during the general time frame of the "2012" movie? It's right up there with how a President of the United States copes mentally when realizing the profound scope of his role in the world. In the mind of a movie producer, however, it might just mean the opportunity to gloat when media references the film during real calamities. That is, if it doesn't ultimately become a liability as the world populace doesn't bother to notice due to being on the run from the earth literally opening up around them.

Ultimately, the big flaw in Hollywood's predictions of the future comes in setting profound events within a short time span from when the movie was made. So many movies lost credibility doing that. Earlier-mentioned "The Time Machine" lost a few points having England nuked in 1966, despite likely inhaling in a sigh of relief there on 1/1/1967 for those who remembered the film seven years earlier.

The world may end up doing the same thing after the movie "2012" stays in the public consciousness the next few years. On January 1, 2013, we may find out Emmerich more than overstated things and that the rule of thumb in movies predicting the future is generally ten to twenty years.

When we realize that the Mayans were also wrong, perhaps we'll finally stop bothering with predicting a devastating future at obsessive levels. Then we can just tuck the idea into the back of our minds that profound earthly events are still imminent and somewhere out there in the unknowns of humankind's trajectory...

Official site for "2012":

http://www.sonypictures.com/movies/2012/