Prescience means having the power to foresee the future and apparently some have this power to predict.
These are our modern-day prophets, our filmmakers. How else can one explain the making of a film like “Contagion” way back in 2011.
The film was about how a virus that started in Asia from a bat, rapidly spread globally thanks to air travel and how there was mass panic, the collapse of social order and how the public health and scientific response was largely ineffective.
Let us spend a few moments exploring the way some writers and directors have been prescient and focused upon the three global crises that are upon us.
Given the fact the fact that the first of these events is upon us, it appears wise to take all three apocalyptic scenarios more seriously.
1: The crisis of pandemics. “Contagion” (2011) directed by Steven Soderbergh and starring Matt Damon, Jude Law and Gwyneth Paltrow is one of a number of post-apocalyptic films about a pandemic virus spread by humans.
Other films include “World War Z” (2013) starring Brad Pitt and “I am Legend” (2007) starring Will Smith.
In fact, most zombie films are about infections being spread by humans.
If you take a look at the consultants that are used by these film directors you can see that members of the scientific community have been worried about pandemic events like this for years.
As far back as 1976, Laurie Garrett was worried that the medical community were focusing exclusively on heart disease and cancer assuming that antibiotics and vaccines put an end to infectious threats.
She was trained in immunology and became a writer and her best-selling book “The Coming Plague” (1994) traced pandemics such as Legionnaires Disease, HIV, and AIDS and she warned that the big one was coming.
Well, it appears that the big one has arrived.
So that means that 45 years ago Garrett realized that something was coming and it was not going to be pretty. And when Steven Soderbergh decided to take this threat seriously he got together with writer Scott Burns and used Laurie Garret along with Lawrence Brilliant and a few from WHO and made an ultra- realistic and extremely prescient film about what we now face every day.
2: The crisis of artificial intelligence. If films like “Contagion” and “World War Z” were predictive of our current COVID pandemic then it’s not a stretch to say that other blockbusters may be equally correct in predicting the global crisis presented by Artificial Intelligence.
The first serious film about the dangerous power of computers was seen in the Stanley Kubrick masterpiece “2001: A Space Odyssey” ( 1968.) About midway through the film it becomes clear that HAL 9000, the computer with a genial personality, unfortunately, has a mind of his own and slowly does away with the human staff aboard the spacecraft.
This was the first of many films addressing the imminent crisis humans face as they must deal with the exponentially expanding intelligence within computers.
Other films that have expressed this worry and conflict include George Lucas THX 1138, the “Terminator” films with Arnold Schwarzenegger, “Minority Report” with Tom Cruise, and “The Matrix” series featuring Keanu Reeves. They all picture a post-apocalyptic world that has been destroyed and taken over by computer machines.
And lest you think these scenarios all come out of the minds of fanciful science fiction writers let us refer to Ray Kurzweil’s book “The Age of Spiritual Machines” published in 1999.
Kurzweil is an MIT trained inventor, consultant to Google and entrepreneur whose previous books have all once again been unnervingly prescient.
In “The Age of Spiritual Machines” Kurzweil predicts that unquestionably computers are the next step in evolution and that their intelligence will soon outpace ours.
He predicts that the first foray into this new war will be that computers will demand legal status and that they will obtain this status which will give them rights to exist. And that’s only the beginning.
3: Catastrophic climatic changes. In the futuristic Steven Spielberg film “AI: Artificial Intelligence” (2001) the world of the 22nd century has been decimated by rising sea levels thanks to global warming and this has reduced the earth’s population.
Mecha’s, or humanoid robots are manufactured and enlisted to keep people company and do servile as well as sexual tasks. The film ends far into the future when the surface of the globe is covered in ice.
The film “The Day After Tomorrow” was written and directed by Roland Emmerich and released in 2004. It was about extreme weather events that usher in global cooling and a new ice age. He based his film on the non-fiction book by Bell and Strieber called “The Coming Global Superstorm.”
The film “Interstellar” was released in 2014, directed by Christopher Nolan and starring Mathew McConaughey. It was about the year 2067 where the world had become uninhabitable thanks to dust storms and humanity’s existence was threatened.
Every day we hear about global warming and climate destabilization. These films extend this issue into inevitable and unnerving outcomes.
When referring to the crisis of pandemics, computer intelligence or climate change scientists use the quaint phrase “It’s not a question of if this will happen but more a question of when it will happen.”
I now begin to see that these blockbuster films grapple with the crisis before us but in addition, they are saying “hey folks, get ready. This stuff is coming.”
Who would have guessed that blockbuster movies turn out to be the most prescient enterprise we have. It appears that directors hire genius scientists and actually listen to what they have to say. This all gives film watching a whole new meaning for me.
