FORECAST SUMMARY

Event / Likelihood
Totalitarism in Britain by 2020 — very low, even decades after that date
Severe bioterror attack — medium

RATINGS
Overall rating: 5.5 (40th of 119 movies)

Futurism rating: 4
This movie is more about the politics of the present than a vision of the future. It does not attempt a meaningful depiction of how societies actually creep toward tyranny.

Entertainment rating: 7
For a movie about terrorism and oppression, this movie ducks every hard question. “Violence can be used for good,” a character states, but that idea is accepted in some form by every society. The regime depicted is sufficiently odious that resisting it is clearly moral.

Despite its imperfections, the movie is interesting as an unfolding series of mysteries, and occasionally as visual spectacle.

Plausibility rating: 7
Unlikely, but there are no inherent or absolute reasons it could not occur.

(A sidenote: we know where the crowd got its masks, but it was impressive that they managed to assemble the entire Zorro ensemble.)

Approach to the future
Vehicle for views on current events

TOPICS DEPICTED

Tyranny

By 2020, England has fallen under control of a vicious fundamentalist Christian regime, brought to power in a climate of fear created by war and plague.

It happened very rapidly: in 2015 things seem to have been normal, and by 2018 the government was rounding up lesbians and banning Islam and many kinds of art.

The trigger was a bioterror attack that killed 80,000 people, amidst a chaotic and dangerous world situation. (The US has apparently dissolved into civil war.)

Such a calamity would trigger drastic responses, but they would flow from the nature of the society afflicted. A stable Western European nation is unlikely to fall so far, so fast.

Above all, England does not have a reservoir of extremists from which to draw, particularly in the religious sphere. A fundamentalist regime is far more plausible in the US, where the “Christian right” has heavily politicized itself. Even here, only a minority of that group has truly authoritarian tendencies.

A much better depiction of tyranny in England is the Richard III set in an alternate 1930s, when that country had some actual fascists. Christian extremism is more the forte of the US, and is well-depicted in the futurist film The Handmaid’s Tale.

Bioterror
Thousands are killed by an engineered bioterror agent.

This is all too plausible. Biotech capabilities are steadily growing, and the possibility of garage bioterror looms, potentially enabling a situation like that in Twelve Monkeys.