Celebrating specific days purely because they were mentioned in a film is fruitless. Take Wednesday, for example. As anyone who grew up watching the Back to the Future films knows, on 21 October 2015 the world was supposed to be full of flying cars and hoverboards. But it isn’t. Instead, it’s full of millions of idiots complaining about the lack of hoverboards via handheld communication devices that are connected to the sum total of the history of human knowledge. That’s nowhere near as good.
The same thing happened on 12 January 1992, when Hal wasn’t invented as predicted in 2001: A Space Odyssey. And I can clearly remember the disappointment on 24 July 2004 when, contrary to the plot of Terminator 3, Skynet didn’t gain sentience and immediately decide to destroy the planet. Furthermore, I’ve watched Timecop repeatedly since the 1990s and, even though no specific date was attributed, I’m certain that, by now, Jean-Claude Van Damme should have started to actively police every period of history all by himself like a brawny Belgian Doctor Who. The fact that he hasn’t tears me up inside.
The sensible thing would be to celebrate dates that were mentioned in films from the past. Like the people who mark Mean Girls Day every 3 October by – from what I’ve been able to tell – posting gifs on Twitter a lot. Or the people who mark Miss Congeniality Day on 25 April, just because a peripheral character in the film says that date out loud once.
Perhaps we should just mark the days when films were released. That’s what the Day of the Dude is: every 6 March, fans come together to celebrate the original release of The Big Lebowski. Or why not be like people who enjoy Star Wars and celebrate every 4 May, for the sole reason that “May the fourth” sounds like “May the force” and that’s apparently all it takes to make something a thing now.
Maybe we’re better off looking to the future after all. Back to the Future, Terminator 3 and 2001 might have let us down, but a film is eventually bound to predict the future with some degree of accuracy. Hopefully, it won’t be the 1987 Melanie Griffiths film Cherry 2000, however, which predicted that the hot new craze of 2017 would be sex-androids that routinely malfunction during intercourse.
Or, for that matter, The Purge, which states that, by 2018, governments will have become so cruel they will make all crime legal for one night a year (date to remember: 21-22 March). Or Rollerball, which claims that state-sanctioned televised murder will become a popular spectator sport in the same year. Let’s hope Soylent Green wasn’t on to something, or else we’ll all be eating each other by 2022. At least if Pacific Rim comes true, most of us will have been murdered by giant sea monsters by 2025. If nothing else, that will stop everyone whining about hoverboards.
