What was 2019 Suppose to Look Like?
- Katie Chock
- Jan 2, 2019
- 3 min read
Welcome to the New Year of 2019, with the new year comes new things but we won't know what 2019 is going to look like until this year ends. We can see what others thought 2019 would look like, or how they designed the year of 2019. In the case of these works Akira, Blade Runner, The Running Man, and The Island.
Akira is a Japanese manga and Japanese anime film both set in 2019, in a post-apocalyptic dystopian cyberpunk world where Tokyo rebuilt themselves after WWIII. In the context of the real world, the manga was written and illustrated by Katsuhiro Otomo first published in 1982 in Youth Magazine. The manga was finished in 1990. In America, Akira was translated and published by Marvel Comics under their Epic Comics imprint. Akira is one of the first manga series to be completely translated into English. While the manga had more to the time frame of the story and more characters, scenes, and subplots the anime film stayed true to the concept of the manga.
In the world of Akira, the benefits of that 2019 are some pretty cool futuristic bikes, some nifty street gang clothing, better technology and the possibility to have psychic powers. However, those powers could either be awakened by another psychic or awakened through government testing. So what's the downside? Well, Tokyo was destroyed in 1982/1988 (depending on the manga or movie) due to these government psychic testing even though Tokyo was rebuilt and now called Neo-Tokyo there are a lot of problems that come with it. Like corruption from the government, anti-government protest, terrorism and gang violence. Akria celebrated the movies 30th-anniversary last year and though this year will mark the 31st anniversary we are far from the 2019 future that Akira was designed as.
Blade Runner the movie is based on the novel Do Androids Dream of Electric Sheep written by Philip K. Dick in 1968. In the book Do Androids Dream of Electric Sheep it's set in either 1992 or 2021 depending on the edition of the book. Blade Runner is also a dystopian future setting in Los Angeles 2019. The movie itself came out in 1982 and directed by Ridley Scott. What are the benefits of living in Blade Runner's 2019? We can space travel and there are colonies off-planet, flying cars, futuristic weapons, in general futuristic technologies, and synthetic humans that were bio-engineered called Nexus-6 replicants. The bad news is if I were to be one of those Nexus-6 replicants then former officer Decker (Harrison Ford) will hunt me down and Earth at this point is kind of a dump and it would be better to live off-world, and everyone is less humane to each other. We are so far from a future like that in Blade Runner, we have some forms of robots and androids but nothing this sophisticated.
The Running Man the movie came out in1987 directed by Paul Michael Glaser, is very loosely based on a book with the title written in 1982 by Stephen King under the pseudonym Richard Bachman. The same thing with Blade Runner, the book and the movie both have different time period settings. The Running Man book is set in 2025 and the movie is set in 2017-2019. 2019 doesn't sound like it will be a good year because we are in another dystopian setting from a totalitarian government system in place that censors everything. I can't see any benefit of living in this time period where we live in a censored world and I could be taken away and sent for re-education or worse thrown on the game show Running Man and be killed off. Luckily we are far away from a future like that of The Running Man.
Lastly, The Island film was made in 2005 and was directed and co-produced by Micheal Bay. While this 2019 in The Island is not a dystopian future it is inspired and imitates "escape-from-dystopia" science fiction works. You could say it's a dystopian setting if you're the clones isolated on the island. You're not allowed to associate with anyone of the opposite sex, follow strict rules, are forced to live on this island with no hope of escape, and have your organs harvested. The benefits of this 2019 are scientific advances in the medical world so if I had a bad liver and super rich I can just get a new one with my same DNA, the bad news is I took my clones liver who has no idea of why they were made or that they're a clone. So it's all about the luck of the draw for this one. Clones have been made but we haven't reached that moral ambiguity yet of making copies of ourselves for harvesting.
So since it is 2019 which style of futuristic fashion should I wear?
Comentários