Great science fiction not only tells viewers exciting stories, but taps into their hopes, aspirations, and fears to show them what the future might bring. The city is one of the best places to look for answers to those burning questions, with the constantly evolving urban landscape being a perfect sandbox for speculative fiction.
Many films have taken a look at what cities of the future might look like, both as shining metropolises that show off the best of human innovation and terrifying dystopias that show how things could go wrong. Whether their vision of the future is good or bad, these movies offer their own unique takes on what a city might look like decades or centuries from now.
Earth in this movie may be a trash-infested wasteland - just one of the ways Wall-E is somewhat scary and disturbing - but while the plucky robot hero repairs the world, humans can enjoy themselves aboard big, beautiful ships like the Axiom. One could argue that the Axiom is not a city as such, but it's certainly expansive and technologically advanced enough to give any earthbound metropolis a run for its money.
Residents of the Axiom have access to everything they could ever need while having all the hard work of running the ship taken care of by robots. There are drawbacks, such as the sedentary lifestyle leaving everyone obese, but that could be taken care of with proper diet, exercise, and futuristic medical treatments, and the fact that the ship lands on Earth at the film's conclusion could give humans many of the tools they need to make rebuilding easier.
Set in the far future after centuries of human-alien contact, Valerian and the City of a Thousand Planets introduced audiences to Alpha, a massive conglomeration of traveling space stations with seventeen million intergalactic residents. Although the sci-fi comedy film received mixed reviews and was a box office bomb, Alpha is a truly breathtaking creation, with its scale and beauty being perfect for viewers who like their futures bright.
What makes Alpha an inspiring place is that it's the result of cooperation between species, who have come together and taken technological and cultural exchange to the next level. While relations aren't always smooth, with inter-species racism being an unfortunate fact of life, the fact that most of Alpha's residents can still coexist peacefully shows that cooperation results in beautiful things.
When Gene Roddenberry created Star Trek, he wanted to portray a future in which humans had moved past their petty conflicts, and the introduction of San Francisco as Starfleet's headquarters in The Motion Picture certainly drove that home. To do justice to a city whose progressive values inspired much of the franchise's guiding principles, the Star Trek team took the city's best qualities and brought them into the 23rd century.
Futuristic additions, such as Starfleet Academy and Kirk's simple but opulent apartment, show that future San Francisco is a comfortable place to live, and a hub of intergalactic diplomacy in which species from far off worlds can sort out their differences and learn to work as a team. This inspiring vision of the future is part of what makes Star Trek so iconic, reminding viewers that the future can be a time of exciting progress, rather than something to fear.
Marty McFly's hometown of Hill Valley seems like a decent place in 1985, but Part II's future of 2015 turns it into a retro-future paradise. While there are things to complain about, such as the draconian prison sentences and incredibly expensive Pepsi, the town is very safe, clean, and efficient, with technology being an unambiguous force for good.
Plenty of viewers like to complain about how the real 2015 didn't look much like the one in Back to the Future Part II, and given the wealth of amazing technology and incredible inventions in Part II, they make a strong point. From innovations like flying cars and advanced hoverboards to the easy-to-overlook convenience of the self-drying jacket, this future is one that would certainly be fun to live in.
When a viewer thinks of Disney, they typically think of fun, optimistic fantasy, and Big Hero 6's San Fransokyo takes their vision into the future. The city is a wonderful blend of many different styles, with old school brownstones just a short drive away from futuristic skyscrapers, and a revamped Golden Gate Bridge clearly influenced by Japanese Shinto architecture.
In addition, as the name suggests, San Fransokyo is a city built on ethnic and cultural diversity, most obviously with the Japanese-America Hamada family, but also seen in Hiro's wonderfully diverse group of friends. The future of Big Hero 6 is a beautiful place, where the problems of rogue scientists and microbots can never take away from the best of technological and cultural advancement.
Blade Runner still holds up today as a beloved sci-fi masterpiece with a lot of interesting ideas about artificial intelligence, but no one would say its take on the future is optimistic or lighthearted. The movie's Los Angeles is a gloomy city with constant rain and heavy pollution, in which replicants escaping from slavery are constantly in danger of being brutally gunned down.
Things seem to be better for humans, who can enjoy the city's futuristic amenities, but even then, they have to contend with dirty air, overcrowding, and sky-high crime rates, making the L.A. of Blade Runner's 2019 a beautiful but hardly livable dystopia. These qualities helped make Blade Runner extraordinarily influential in science fiction that followed, particularly those portraying a dark future.
Since the 1980s were a time of high crime, it made sense that Paul Verhoeven's RoboCop would take it up to eleven for their dystopian future. Before Alex Murphy is revived with his cybernetic upgrades, the likes of Clarence Boddicker practically have free rein over Detroit and are smug and self-assured even when arrested for murder.
Like L.A. in Blade Runner, RoboCop's Detroit is a crime-infested hellhole, but probably even worse, since the police force is controlled by a shady corporation with the shady Dick Jones calling the shots. It also looks very low-tech compared to a lot of sci-fi futures, and residents will be constantly bombarded by advertisements seemingly designed to play on their worst impulses.
When Colonel Shikishima called Neo-Tokyo "a garbage heap made up of a bunch of hedonistic fools," he really wasn't kidding. The city's infrastructure is crumbling, and any law-abiding citizens have to deal with out-of-control biker gangs, apocalypse cults, and a corrupt, heavy-handed government that doesn't even have the competence to keep the peace.
All that's barely scratching the surface, for when juvenile delinquent Tetsuo unleashes his telekinetic powers, the city goes even further to the brink of destruction. All of this makes Akira the quintessential dystopian anime, tapping into nuclear fears and concerns about youth gone wild that were deeply felt in 1980s Japan.
Escape from New York is set in a version of the city that no one would ever want to be trapped in, with the whole of Manhattan island being a penal colony where crime bosses are practically warlords. So, when Snake Plissken is sent to rescue the President, he's dropped into an impossibly large prison in which the only rule is might makes right, and the outside world is little better, with the film's America being an authoritarian state at war with a still-extant Soviet Union.
Like RoboCop, Escape from New York was made at a time when its vision of the future seemed like a realistic possibility, with crime spiraling out of control to the point where drastic measures like those used in the movie might be necessary. While the film thankfully did not predict the future, its vision still has the power to make the viewer think about what happens when chaos is the order of the day.
Of all the dystopian futures ever put to film, Dredd's Mega-City One has a strong claim to being an almost literal Hell on Earth. With most of the world a bombed-out wasteland, Mega-City One is a vast metropolis spanning much of America's eastern seaboard, where the streets host a non-stop orgy of violent crime and the only force capable of restoring order are the Judges, who enforce the law through the barrel of a gun.
To make matters worse, while Judges like the titular Dredd and trainee Anderson may be honest, if brutal, cops, others are blatantly corrupt, joining forces with vicious killers for their own gain. When a city has 800 million residents, 17,000 reports of crime a day, and law enforcement just as brutal as the criminals they face, "dystopia" might be too mild a word to describe it.
