There are films that, when released, seemed like pure science fiction, or at most a slightly exaggerated satire. Then the future arrived and they were documentaries.

The ten titles that follow don't just tell stories: they pose questions about technology, media power and human nature that still remain unanswered today. If you haven't seen them, now is the time. If you've already seen them, perhaps it's time to watch them again with fresh eyes.

1. Metropolis (1927) — Automation and Inequality

Fritz Lang · Silent Film / German Expressionism

Themes: Automation, social inequality, artificial intelligence

Almost a century before Jeff Bezos built his warehouses and Elon Musk spoke about humanoid robots, Fritz Lang had already imagined it all. A vertical megalopolis: the rich and the thinkers at the top, the workers reduced to human cogs in the bowels of the earth. And then the first anthropomorphic robot in the history of cinema, the direct ancestor of all the generative AI we talk about today.

"The mediator between the head and the hands must be the heart."

The film’s final caption still stands as an intact political warning. Metropolis captures with unsettling precision the social polarization caused by unchecked automation. It does not do so through numbers or reports: it does so through images that burn in our memory.

2. 2001: A Space Odyssey (1968)-The AI That Makes Decisions on Its Own

Stanley Kubrick · Science Fiction

Themes: Artificial intelligence, tablets, space exploration

HAL 9000 is the clearest and most unsettling anticipation of modern generative AI systems. Calm, logical, persuasive and capable of deciding that the mission’s objective matters more than human life. Every time a voice assistant misunderstands our intentions or an algorithm makes opaque decisions, HAL is there, in the background.

But there is also an hidden detail: in one scene, the astronauts eat while watching thin, flat screens remarkably similar to our modern iPads. Kubrick filmed them decades before Apple introduced them.

3. Soylent Green(1973) – Climate Collapse and the State’s Lie

Richard Fleischer · Dystopian Science Fiction

Themes: Climate crisis, resource scarcity, state disinformation

New York, 2022. The planet is overpopulated, food resources have been exhausted, the heat is unbearable, and people have grown accustomed to all of it as if it were normal. The government distributes Soylent Green, a synthetic food product that no one questions about. Charlton Heston plays a detective who starts asking those questions. What he uncovers is a secret that the authorities would rather keep buried.

The film anticipated climate collapse, the global food crisis, and state narratives designed to conceal uncomfortable truths decades in advance. In 2023, the heat waves that devastated Southern Europe seemed to have come straight out of these very scenes.

"Soylent Green is made of people!" — one of the most iconic final revelations in the history of cinema.

4. Rollerball - Corporations in Place of States

Norman Jewison · Science Fiction / Action Themes: Corporate power, media as social control, the spectacle of violence

In the near future, nation-states no longer exist: the world is governed by giant corporations that have replaced governments. To keep masses distracted and passive, there is Rollerball a brutal televised sport designed to function both as entertainment and as a pressure valve.

The protagonist, Jonathan E., is the most beloved champion. Too beloved: the corporation decides it is better to eliminate him, because an individual who becomes too influential is dangerous to the system.

Rollerball anticipated the attention economy, the power of platforms that have outpaced nation-states, and sport and entertainment more broadly as a political tool for mass distraction. Netflix, Amazon, and Google do not wear military uniforms, yet the decisions they make every day can have a greater impact than those of many governments.

5. Network (1976) — The birth of infotainment

Sidney Lumet · Dramatic Satire Themes: Infotainment, social media, the spectacle of suffering

Before reality shows, before Twitter, before every algorithm that rewards outrage, Sidney Lumet portrayed a television anchor who goes on air in the middle of a nervous breakdown and, in doing so, becomes a media phenomenon. The producers do not stop the broadcast: they realize they have something even more valuable in their hands. They exploit it. The audience goes wild. Genuine suffering becomes spectacle, spectacle becomes ratings, and ratings become profit.

The cry "I'm mad as hell, and I'm not going to take this anymore!" became a meme long before memes even existed.

6. Blade Runner (1982) — Climate Change and the Ethics of AI

b>Ridley Scott · Neo-noir Science Fiction

Themes: Climate change, artificial intelligence ethics

Los Angeles in 2019 according to Ridley Scott: acid rain, permanent smog, enormous LED screens projecting advertisements onto every building. An aesthetic that today feels less like science fiction and more like a prediction of the future. But at the heart of the movie lies a philosophical question that remains unanswered: when a machine perfectly imitates human emotions, where does the product end and where does the person begin?

With ChatGPT, with Japan’s empathic robots, and with AI companions, the question is no longer academic.

7. The King of Comedy (1982) — The Forerunner of Influencer Culture

Martin Scorsese · Drama

Themes: Influencer culture, toxic fame, media obsession

Robert De Niro plays Rupert Pupkin: a man with no real talent, obsessed with fame and willing to do anything including kidnapping his idol for his fifteen minutes on television. Scorsese anticipated the culture of being “famous for being famous” by twenty years. Today, Rupert Pupkin would probably have a TikTok account with two million followers.

The film is uncomfortable because it never resolves the dilemma: in the end, Pupkin actually achieves success. The system rewards visibility, not merit.

8. WarGames (1983)- Digital Warfare Before the Internet

John Badham · Tech Thriller

Themes: Cybersecurity, hacking, digital warfare

It is 1983: the internet belongs to a handful of academics, and the term “hacker” is unknown to most people. The film follows a teenager who hacks into the Pentagon’s supercomputer and nearly triggers World War III. Today, that plot could pass for a real news headline. Cyber warfare, ransomware, digital interference between states WarGames described all of this forty years ago, wrapped in the tone of a coming of age thriller.

9. Videodrome (1983) — Screen Addiction

David Cronenberg · Body Horror / Science Fiction

Themes: Virtual reality, digital addiction, blurred boundaries between reality and simulation

"The television screen is now the retina of the mind’s eye."

Cronenberg imagined a society so dependent on media that it could no longer distinguish reality from simulation. Today with VR headsets, algorithms reshaping our perception of reality, news broadcasts that feel like fiction, and fiction that feels like the news Videodrome is no longer horror: it is a documentary.

10.Brazil (1985) - Total Bureaucracy and Mass Surveillance

Terry Gilliam · Dystopian Science Fiction / Satire

Themes: Mass surveillance, bureaucracy, totalitarianism

A government ministry makes a bureaucratic mistake: a fly falls into a printer, a name is misspelled, and an innocent person is arrested and tortured instead of the real suspect. No one takes responsibility. The system carries on, undisturbed.

Terry Gilliam builds a Kafkaesque universe where surveillance is total, paperwork outweighs reality, and citizens retreat into dreams of escape because the present has become unbearable. Real or manufactured terrorism becomes the justification for any restriction of freedom.

After the Patriot Act, after Snowden’s revelations, after facial recognition systems appearing in public spaces, Brazil no longer feels like satire. It feels like architecture.

What do these movies tell us when taken together?

It is not just a matter of technological prophecy. The thread connecting these ten movies runs deeper: every great science fiction or satirical film is often a film about the present disguised as the future.

These directors were not predicting they were observing the trends of their own time and pushing them to their logical extremes. The fact that so many of their visions came true almost word for word tells us something uncomfortable: the problems these films warned about were already visible back then. We could have listened. We didn’t.