Movie Mixtape: 6 Movies Set In The "Future" Of 2020

If you're gripped with terror at the uncertainty of the coming year, fear not! A dozen or so movies made over the last half-century take place in 2020, so we have a pretty good idea of what's going to happen.

For the most part, that means grandiose journeys in the stars and disaster here at home.

From the mid-20th century right up to 2020's doorstep, films have mostly envisioned that our current time would be spent contemplating the farther reaches of the galaxy in one form or another: Either by visiting it, or having it visited upon us. That, and dragons.

Here are 6 movies with visions of a future that's here today.

With this and Stranded, the early 2000s thought that 2020 would be really interested in sending people to Mars. Curiously, both movies had the same basic idea: going to Mars would be catastrophic, astronauts would die, and the ones that lived would learn that humankind used to live on Mars before we came to Earth.

It turns out that setting the trip in 2020 was only slightly aspirational. It'll be a while before people are ready to go to Mars, but the Mars Rover holds global fascination, and, as if by sci-fi magic, we totally discovered flowing water on the red planet. Presumably, that means Don Cheadle is waiting for us up there.

This direct-to-DVD-esque action movie's bold vision for 2020 involves a unified Korea. That...has not happened.

It's the major unexplored idea in an aggressively simple bad guy chase where an exhausted cop hunts down a serial killer who targets scientists because of some secret experiments that took place years before. In a way, the lack of exploration of North and South Korea come together ends up accidentally fascinating because the film largely deals with the realities of that reunion as the accepted norm and political backdrop for a boilerplate game of cat and mouse. The cops have some lightly advanced tech (mostly weapons) but otherwise its vision of 2020 — beyond the earth-shattering political change it barely talks about — remains startlingly non-futuristic.

Here's the deal. Edge of Tomorrow is a fantastic title. Evocative. Poetic. It creates the visual of someone achingly close to something prized without being able to attain it. Great title. There. I've said my piece.

It's one thing, like Corman, to imagine a world a half-century into the future and another to set your 2014 movie six years later, especially when the warfighting tech and alien invasion circumstances are so brain-meltingly advanced. That also happened with the 2020 of Pacific Rim. The underlying message? We remain woefully unprepared for attacks from goo-filled aliens and Godzilla-sized monsters.

Then again, the military already started testing out exoskeletons, so maybe Edge of Tomorrow is not that far off. Now we just need time-bending aliens to land so we can harness their power.