7 Times Sci-Fi Movies Were Scarily Accurate

One of the most interesting things about science fiction is that it is the genre of “what if”. Sci-fi stories often weave interesting and sometimes frightening stories that imagine futures and worlds with advanced technologies and science that do incredible things beyond what we have in the real world. The best of these stories root their ideas and creations in reality and simply push things to the next level, exploring how humanity reacts and responds.

But while there are some sci-fi stories that are pure imagination, there are others that get things right. Some sci-fi movies either are extremely accurate in the science they’re presenting — even if it hasn’t really been tested in the real world just yet — while others end up being very accurate about things that once seemed like fiction but are now huge parts of our daily lives, for better or for worse.

7) Military Drones (Terminator 3: Rise of the Machines)

The Terminator franchise as a whole predicted the future in a lot of frighteningly accurate ways. Tapping into Cold War fears about technology and the military, the film leaned heavily into the idea of autonomous warfare and the use of artificial intelligence’s role in that as well as the idea of the use of AI in a surveillance state. And, indeed, we’ve seen the rise of AI and increased use of technology when it comes to military and defense which is increasingly unsettling though we’re fortunately not quite to Skynet levels — yet.

However, one thing that the Terminator franchise did get scarily accurate is drones, specifically military drones. While drones appear throughout the franchise, it’s in Terminator 3: Rise of the Machines that we see them used most extensively and most lethally with the Hunter-Killer Weapons Platform taken over by Skynet and used to attack, complete with missiles and lasers. In the real world, militaries around the globe carry out drone attacks using remotely controlled devices that carry missiles and bombs that can target a variety of marks which makes the sci-fi of Terminator 3 feel really uncomfortable now.

6) Identity Theft and Cybersecurity (The Net)

While the internet is an integral part of daily life now (you are reading this online, after all,) it wasn’t that long ago when the internet was a pretty new thing and the idea of identity theft and online surveillance was the stuff of science fiction. It’s also something that 1995 movie The Net got frighteningly right. The film follows a tech worker (Sandra Bulloch) whose identity is not only stolen but erased as part of a massive conspiracy that goes much further and is much more sinister than you’d expect.

Admittedly there is a lot about The Net that is a little dramatic and outlandish — and not to mention dated given the age of the movie. That’s to be expected. That said, however, the film does an eerily good job at predicting how dependent our lives are on the information stored in computers. At one point in the film Bullock’s character declares “our lives are on the computer” and she’s right — which means that our lives are not only vulnerable to being stolen but surveilled in ways we can’t even imagine. Given what we’ve seen even things as simple as doxxing online or more unsettling as deepfakes, The Net was really ahead of its time in predicting how terrifying a net-based world could be.

5) Self-Driving Cars (Total Recall)

We may not have flying cars like we were promised by the Jetsons, but we do have self-driving cars — though mercifully they are less creepy than what was predicted in 1990’s Total Recall. In that film, robot drivers operated the Johnny Cab, making small talk and piloting the vehicle as it takes the rider to its destination. It’s a little unsettling.

In reality, driverless cars don’t need a robot to give the illusion of a driver and there are several manufacturers that produce cars that operate at some level of automation. Tesla in particular is known for their Autopilot feature, though it is technically not full automation and requires human supervision. Waymo, on the other hand, is completely driverless, though neither Tesla’s Autopilot nor Waymo’s driverless cars are without incidents and controversy — including accidents and fires.

4) Social Media (The Truman Show)

1998’s The Truman Show told the story of a man (Jim Carrey) who is unaware that his entire life is playing out on a soundstage and that it’s being filmed as a reality television show the entire world and, as a result, his entire world and life is an illusion. Reading that description, you might think that The Truman Show is merely commentary on reality television, but in fact, it actually was frighteningly right about something else: social media.

Thanks to Facebook, X, and especially Instagram, TikTok, and YouTube, social media has become a place where people share pretty much every detail of their lives from the most important to the most mundane, with massive audiences of users tuning in and sometimes engaging. It’s led to the rise of the content creator and the influencer and while it’s not exactly an exact parallel of The Truman Show, we’ve even seen some uncomfortable similarities between Truman Burbank’s manufactured experience to that of the children of family vloggers online. This might be one of the more frightening things movies got right.

3) The Algorithm (Minority Report)

2002’s Minority Report had a lot of things that have fortunately not proven to be accurate, but one thing that has is the use of data — specifically when it comes to advertising. Minority Report depicted a future where marketers and advertisers were able to target their offers and ads to your interests very directly, including personalized holograms. While we’re not there just yet, we also can’t log onto the internet without our social media feeds being full of ads that line up with whatever it is we searched for the day before, talked about on the phone with friends, or even what stores we shopped at last week.

Welcome to the algorithm. Pretty much every piece of information turns into data that can be used to customize ads and messages designed to appeal to your specific interests and behaviors. It’s a little creepy, but it’s also just a way of life now.

2) Biological Hazards (The Andromeda Strain)

1971’s The Andromeda Strain is less a situation where the film frighteningly predicted the future, but more one where it was terrifyingly accurate to the science even at the time the film was made. The film follows a team of scientists who investigate a deadly organism of extraterrestrial origin. While the threat in the movie is an alien organism, it could have easily been a newly discovered virus, a bacteria strain, or even the use of biological weapons, much of what happens in the story would be the same in terms of dealing with some sort of dangerous outbreak.

What makes The Andromeda Strain so frightening in terms of its accuracy is that we see that the scientists and researchers responding to the threat, for all of their knowledge and research, are also very much building the plane while flying it as it were. How they react to this new threat is as much a high-stake game of trial and error as it is anything else and serves as a reminder that getting things right with unknown threats is sometimes just a matter of well-educated chance.

1) Artificial Intelligence (Her)

In 2013’s Her, Joaquin Pheonix stars as a lonely man who falls in love with an AI virtual assistant. Now, a dozen years later, that situation doesn’t seem that much like science fiction anymore. The use of AI and chatbots have infiltrated every aspect of our lives and while they are commonly presented as being a convenience tool, many people have become reliant on AI for not only basic tasks, but for companionship as well.

The idea of someone “talking” to an AI chatbot and forming a “relationship” with them is no longer something merely of fiction. There have been a handful of headline-capturing stories of people who have done just that, and not always to positive result. Her was merely ahead of the curve and frighteningly accurate in how human-machine interaction could become so entangled in deeply personal ways.

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