Tomb

If you check the Internet Movie Database entry for the film 2010: The Year We Make Contact (1984), you’ll notice that some wise guy has added an FAQ — the frequently asked questions table — consisting of the question “Did it really happen in 2010?” The answer? “Of course not!” Oh, and there was a little spoiler tag on the answer, too. That was thoughtful.

So yeah, you might have noticed that the events in the sci-fi flick 2010 didn’t actually occur. That’s largely due to the fact that it’s a sequel to 2001: A Space Odyssey (1968), and I’m pretty sure that movie didn’t come true either. It’s all kind of moot anyway, because nobody’s given any thought to the film 2010 since it came out. I think they go to Jupiter and talk to a red headlight or something.

That’s the thing about the 21st century — all of the cool-sounding, formerly futuristic dates are coming and going without giving us the hyper drives and teleportation belts we were promised. We did get arsenic-based life forms and face transplants though, so that’s pretty cool.

The year 2010 is also when Lisa Simpson supposedly falls in love and becomes engaged in the classic Simpsons episode Lisa’s Wedding (1995). Naturally, The Simpsons is still going, and Lisa is still an eight-year-old child, but that just illustrates the value of alternate-reality episodes like Lisa’s Wedding. These are characters who will never age, change or grow up, except in amusing little flash-forwards, and this episode fleshes out the smartest member of the Simpsons family quite beautifully. The bizarre little glimpses of a “futuristic” 2010 (holographic representations of now-extinct trees, a digital Big Ben flashing “12:00” and crying, melting robots) are still funny.

For some reason, 2010 has been the futuristic setting of several very recent sci-fi flicks, such as Zebraman (2004). It’s a bit like what happened near the end of the 20th century, when all of our science fiction was still set in 1999 or 2001, even as we began to realize that we had stuff in the fridge that would still be edible by then. The worst offender was the Nintendo game BattleTanx, released on December 31, 1998, yet set in a post-apocalyptic 2001. Here, tanks roamed the nuked-out wasteland in search of the few surviving human females, now dubbed Queenlords! Yeah, that never happened. In fact, BattleTanx was still on store shelves when the year of the depicted disaster occurred.

Also claiming to take place in 2010 is last year’s awesome sci-fi epic District 9 (2009). This film gets a free pass though, because a) it depicts an alternate history in which an alien spacecraft reaches Earth in 1982, changing our timeline significantly, and b) it is so amazingly cool. Seriously, go watch it. If you’ve seen it, watch it again. The film predicts a 2010 in which Sharlto Copley undergoes a badass transformation and goes berserk with a lot of really big weapons. Meanwhile, in the real 2010, Sharlto Copley co-starred in The A-Team (2010). Ha! Called it!

District 13 (2004) is not only set in 2010, but is the second film on this list to have the word “district” in the title. In it, the guy who invented parkour (David Belle) and the guy who invented kicking your ass (Cyril Raffaelli) team up to stop an insane gang leader from nuking a Parisian ghetto with a neutron bomb. The two of them perform about nine impossible stunts per minute, and beat up about 400 guys. So, did anything like that really happen this year?

Yes. Yes it did. Everything in District 13 actually happened. David Belle and Cyril Raffaelli saved Paris by running and kicking people. And it was amazing. I choose to believe this without actually checking the facts.

OK 2011, it’s your turn. Try and top that.