The Actual Future Is So Much Cooler Than Back to the Future II Predicted
The Atlantic takes a look at Back to the Future II to see what the film’s predictions overlooked:
Enough with the flying cars and Hoverboards already. There’s way more to the future than a few cool ways to zip from one place to the next. I know this because the future, finally, is upon us.
Yes, 2015 is the year Marty McFly visits in Back to the Future II. I’ve been counting down to this moment since the film came out in 1989. Although only a small fraction of the story is actually set in the year 2015—which was still 30 years away from the 1985 present of the story—it’s chockablock with technological predictions about what life would be like today. Many of which (sort of) came true.
But the biggest twin advances filmmakers didn’t see coming: mobile Internet technology and the on-demand, personalized culture that formed around it. As a result, the version of 2015 in Back to the Future II will forever seem stuck in the past.
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