Two-Way Déjà Vu with ‘70s Sci-Fi Flicks

Sci-fi cinema almost habitually broke the bounds of human comfort and convention by engaging with alternative scenarios of life. Many of these alternative worlds have crept into the real world around us over the years, making one wonder whether stories on the screen serve as the scripts for our future. It’s easy to see this happen in the past and what better but retro cinema to revisit for a glimpse of this phenomenon.

Here are five sci-fi thrillers that entertained audiences in the ‘70s and onwards, offering a déjà vu for those still around and witnessing the forebodings materialize out of the screen. At the same time, they are likely to conjure the same feeling among the younger lot of today who are aware of these scientific and societal developments if watch these retro titles from the ‘70s.

1. The Resurrection of Zachary Wheeler (1971)

One of the earliest movies about human cloning in labs, Bob Wynn’s The Resurrection of Zachary Wheeler couldn’t get the exposure of a commercial hit, owing mainly to the movie’s low quality in technical departments. But by its theme of cloning people for organ harvesting, the movie was way ahead of its time in predicting future societies. Top-tier medical researchers (James Daly and Angie Dickinson)) working under the command of a powerful political influencer (Robert Wilke) to create human clones for organs presents a moral dilemma that remains open for debate today when stem cells research for medical goals is a major area of interest in biological sciences.

2. The Mind Snatchers (1972)

Before the Jack Nicholson-starrer One Flew Over the Cuckoo’s Nest (1975) brought the horrors of insane asylums into spotlight, a young Christopher Walken played a rebellious solider – James Reese – in Bernard Girard’s The Mind Snatchers. While Reese is arrested and institutionalized in a military-run psychiatric research facility, he witnesses the research’s core objective – taking control of the human mind by using lab monkeys as the non-human primate subjects for experimentation. The original title of the movie – The Happiness Cage – makes a perfect match for the issue highlighted in this story which sees its actualization in our age in the form of advanced brain implants for therapeutic purposes.

3. Soylent Green (1973)

When the population bomb explodes and resources are depleted, what’re you goanna eat? Richard Fleischer’s dystopian thriller Soylent Green answered it in a horrifying way, but one whose actualization may not be ruled out entirely. The movie’s brilliance lies in the contrast it presents between the misery of life in a collapsed society and the comfort of death should one chose to embrace euthanasia – dubbed as “going home” in the story. This contrast couldn’t be relevant enough to today’s world where euthanasia is increasingly being pushed in some countries even for non-fatal and otherwise treatable illnesses while all kinds of artificial foods are under development, including artificial meat, to feed the populace.

4. Embryo (1976)

The world’s first artificial wombs are in experimental development as we speak but exactly five decades ago, Ralph Nelson’s Embryo brought the concept to life on the big screen with Rock Hudson as the protagonist. In the movie, Hudson plays a doctor who is experimenting with an artificial uterus in his home-run lab. When he raises a newborn orphan girl via the device, he faces a dark moral dilemma that sits on the fence between the roles of nature and humans in sustaining life. In our age of IVF technology and fertility issues, 50-year-old Embryo has only become more pertinent for viewing and thoughtful discussion.

5. The Cassandra Crossing (1976)

A U.S. military lab experimenting with highly infectious pathogens in Europe, security breach at the facility, the release of the infection – what could go wrong? As if predicting a global pandemic that started in a biolab, The Cassandra Crossing by director George P. Cosmatos literally becomes the déjà vu moment for contemporary audiences. With an ensemble cast of some of the most celebrated names in cinema and a haunting score for opening credits, this movie almost shockingly warned us of what was coming. Cosmatos is said to have commented once: “We are our own worst enemies, because we’re killing ourselves with so-called progress.” Fifty years later, his words ring true.

About the Author

Screenwriter, editor, blogger, and reviewer Ernest Dempsey (pen name of Karim Khan), is the author of ScreenScope with Ernie, a critique of 50 movies in the sci-fi, horror, mystery, and thriller genres. He runs the movie review site Filmospheric and puts together the newsletter Filmphernalia.

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