Peer to Peer Magazine

PEER TO PEER: THE QUARTERLY MAGA ZINE OF ILTA 28 Almost 70 years before the first manned lunar landing the 1902 silent short A TRIP TO THE MOON thrilled audiences with a fantastic tale about astronomers who travel to the moon and back in a giant cannon. It and other rickety but wonderfully imaginative silent films, early talkies, and the many, many state-of-the-art science fiction movies made in the decades since are veritable time machines that, for the price of a ticket or with a click of the remote, propel us to both the brightest and darkest of fantasy futures. Whether they preview future Utopias or Dystopias, these genre films are fun and escapist. But more important, the really good ones, seven of which are listed below, can inspire us to contemplate what we and our world are today and what we wish (or not wish) for tomorrow. And really, isn't that precisely what Law2020: Future Horizons invites and challenges us to do as ILTAns? METROPOLIS (1927) and MODERN TIMES (1936) are two classic forebears of fast-forward features. The first is set in an urban dystopian world, follows the lifetime pursuit of the wealthy son of the city's ruler to overcome the vast gulf separating the classes of their cities. Superman's creators, Jerry Siegel and Joe Shuster, named their Kryptonian superhero's adopted city after it. And the robot of this film inspired the look 60 years later for C-3PO in STAR WARS: EPISODE IV – A NEW HOPE (1977). The second is a comedy satire written, directed by, and starring Charlie Chaplin in which his iconic Little Tramp character struggles to survive in the modern, industrialized world. Intending this to be his first talkie, Chaplin wrote a dialogue script and experimented with sound. Yet, though talkies had long- since become standard in Hollywood, he decided sound was inappropriate for his famous character and reverted to the silent format. THINGS TO COME (1936) is based on the novel "The Shape of Things to Come" by H.G. Wells, who also wrote the screenplay. It opens in 1940 on the eve of WWII and takes us on a roller-coaster time ride through a century of turmoil and progress to 2036 A.D. Along the way we witness a global war, a pandemic, anarchy, and a dictatorship — and finally, Utopia. This eerily prescient saga foresees TV, jet planes, evil dictators, and manned space travel. Produced three years prior to Hitler's invasion of Poland in 1939, the movie foresees the start of WWII in 1940, only a year later than real life; that the war would be fought on land, sea and air; and also that London's Underground would serve as a giant air raid shelter. Not only does the movie predict TV, it also accurately predicts the scale and usage of large-format, flat-screen jumbo-tron LCD monitors. THE TIME MACHINE (1960), another H.G. Wells sci-fi masterpiece, is an early example of the Dying Earth subgenre, follows the adventures of a 19th century British inventor as he travels 80,000 years into the future to find that humanity has split into two warring species. Wells' novel is generally credited with popularizing the concept of time travel via a vehicle that allows its operator to travel through time purposefully and selectively, and the term by Andy Spiegel Andy is a creative director and freelance writer. A lifelong movie lover, he maintains a movie review blog called Andy's Private Screening Room at jasscreeningroom.blogspot.com. Andy can be contacted at jandy1943@gmail.com. Future Horizons In The Movies Even before movies had a voice, they had their eye on the future!

• Cover