Don't Look Where We're Going: Visions of the Future in Science-Fiction Films, 1970-82

Franklin, H. Bruce. "Don't Look Where We're Going: Visions of the Future in Science-Fiction Films, 1970-82." SFS 10.1 #29, (March 1983): 70-80. Rpt. Shadows of the Magic Lamp. George E. Slusser and Eric S. Rabkin, eds. Carbondale: Southern Illinois P, 1985. Alien Zone.[1]

Concentrates on two "great archetypal image[s] of the future" in SF films, "THE WONDER CITY OF THE FUTURE and THE MARVELOUS FLYING MACHINE," from METROPOLIS (1926) to BLADE RUNNER (1982), with most of the discussion on the more important of the fifty-two Anglo-American films "set wholly or in part in some distinctly future time which were released for general distribution from 1970 through . . . summer 1982" (71). See for contrast of the celebration of the "technocratic order" in Things to Come with an attack on that order—seen as a "totalitarian apparatus"—in such films as THX 1138, ICE,[2] and A CLOCKWORK ORANGE (film) (72).