In Search of Tomorrow (2021)

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Flack
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In Search of Tomorrow (2021)

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In the early 2000s, just as nostalgia for the 1980s was really ramping up, VH1 launched "I Love the 80's," a mini series that featured musicians, comedians, and actors talking about icons from the 80s like Rubik's Cubes, Alf, and the Challenger explosion. Each topic was presented as its own short segment that featured comments and memories from a handful of talking heads before moving on to the next one. Like blocks of music videos, there was no overall narrative arc for each show -- topics were presented and discussed for a few minutes before moving on to the next one.

A better name for 2021's "In Search of Tomorrow" would have been "I Love the 80s: Sci-Fi Movie Edition." With a run time of just over five hours and a tagline claiming "The Definitive '80s Sci-Fi Documentary," I was curious as to how the documentary's content would be organized and presented and what exactly would be covered. Five hours is a long time.

The scope of the documentary is sci-fi movies from the 1980s, and while not every single science fiction movie from the decade is touched upon, an awful lot of them are. Movies are discussed chronologically, except when they aren't, and segments are broken up into bite-sized (niblet-sized?) portions. The documentary doesn't explain how the content is about to be presented so the beginning felt a little disjointed until I caught on and realized this film is exactly like "I Love the 80s." Films are introduced, various people discuss and comment on them for approximately three minutes, and then it's on to the next one -- rinse and repeat until the end of 1989 is reached, five hours later.

For the most part movies are presented and discussed in a chronological fashion, year by year, but occasionally a topic will be presented -- "world building," for example -- and they'll touch on a series of movies in that category. I just search Google for the top 10 sci-fi films of 1984 and of those, six (The Terminator, Ghostbusters, Dune, 2010: The Year We Make Contact, The Last Starfighter, and The Adventures of Buckaroo Bonzai Across the 8th Dimension) are all specifically covered, while two of the others (Repo Man and Night of the Comet) are mentioned in other groupings. The final two films, Starman and The Ice Pirates, are not discussed directly but do appear as parts of montages.

The talking heads featured throughout the film vary. In the three-minute segment covering Howard the Duck we get input from six people: Ed Gale (the actor who portrayed Howard the Duck), Craig Miller (publicist for Lucasfilm, Ltd), Angelique Roche (host of Syfy Wire), Julie Brown (writer/actor of Earth Girls are Easy), Tim Cogshell (NPR film critic) and Phil Tippet (special effects/stop-motion supervisor). As with each segment, comments are presented along with clips from the film and behind the scenes footage. While everyone who appears in the documentary is knowledgeable, several of them were unknown to me, and few megastars appear. For E.T. we get Dee Wallace; representing Aliens are actors like Mark Rolston and Carrie Henn (who played the young girl, Newt), but no Sigourney Weaver. In between names like Billy Dee Williams and Gene Simmons are people like Ian Nathan (editor of Empire Magazine), John Knoll (ILM), Craig Safan (composer), and Gray Scott ("Futurist").

Big films like Back to the Future, Predator, and E.T. get more coverage than most, but no single film takes over the documentary's focus for long. If anything, I was surprised at how much screen time films like Explorers, Flight of the Navigator, and Spacehunter got. I think of all the movies featured there were only two I hadn't seen: Miracle Mile, and Akira.

Although the five-hour "In Search of Tomorrow" runtime may seem intimidating, because of the way the content is presented there is no harm in pausing the film and consuming the content over multiple viewings. I learned a few things from watching the film, and even more than that, kept a running tab of movies I want to revisit in the near future because of it.
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Flack
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Re: In Search of Tomorrow (2021)

Post by Flack »

The director of this film made two similar films covering 80s horror films, In Search of Darkness 1 and 2. I'm halfway through the first one and many of the films I felt were missing from the sci-fi collection (Gremlins, Videodrome, The Stuff) are covered here. If you like 80s horror, you'll enjoy these, too.
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Tdarcos
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Re: In Search of Tomorrow (2021)

Post by Tdarcos »

At first, I thought this was a movie either reprising the story, or discussing the making of the eponymous soap opera. Then I remembered, that program was Search for Tomorrow. Does it give any information on how the name is related to the subject, i.e. '80s sci-fi films?
Evil cannot create anything new
They can only corrupt and ruin
What good forces have invented or made.
- J.R.R. Tolkien

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Re: In Search of Tomorrow (2021)

Post by pinback »

You're asking why something about science fiction makes reference to "tomorrow"?
I don't have to say anything. I'm a doctor, too.

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