From monsters fighting robots to a grim look at a decaying healthcare system, past movies set in this new year offer a mixed outlook on what’s to come

The year 2025: It certainly has that futuristic ring, doesn’t it? Not round enough to come across overly tidy, not odd enough to appear chosen at random, 2025 sounds like a clear interval: a turning point, a historical marker, or possibly a deadline. It could well turn out to be any or all of those things, though the outlook feels less futuristically ambiguous than anti-futuristically bleak at the moment.

Is there a chance that humanity can back away from frighteningly destructive and relentless wars, rollbacks of human rights, and insistence on having some kind of debate about what kind of medical care works (vaccines) and doesn’t (denying people medical coverage)? It seems unlikely, and even the oddball soothsayers of cinema have a little trouble with this question, because for whatever reason the movies with major events keyed to 2025 have a secondhand quality, whether that’s in megabudget blockbusters of recent history or energetic schlock from earlier on. (Anyway, there’s less difference between the two than the blockbuster-makers would have you believe.) Let’s take a look at the citizens of cinema’s 2025 and see what lessons we might be able to extract from them.