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5. Ender’s Game I am not familiar with the beloved novel that spawned this movie, but I truly enjoyed the film adaptation. To be honest, I do not remember the movie being specifically set in the 22nd Century (anyone?) but I’ll go with it. The plot, which surely inspired the upcoming Ready Player One’s original novel, focuses on Ender, who has been chosen to be trained to attack aliens that are Earth’s enemies. What else do you want, it’s a futuristic movie?

The movie keeps you enthralled even though you suspect most of the action-based plot twists, the special effects are intense but not obtrusive, and the cast, from Asa Butterfield, who plays the lead character, to Harrison Ford, Viola Davis, and Ben Kingsley, turns in a solid performance.

What really works, however, is that you do not necessarily expect the ultimate resolution of the conflict between the aliens and the humans, and it works in a way that crystallizes an already well-developed main character. Is there going to be a sequel?

4. Vanilla Sky Major spoilers about this Tom Cruise/Cameron Diaz/Penelope Cruz vehicle follow. Nowhere near as good as the classic original Abre Los Ojos, which inspired the Cameron Crowe update, Vanilla Sky is nevertheless one of the best movies that turns out to be set in the 22nd Century. The thing about it is, you do not know that that is the case until near the end of the movie, when the confusing and bizarre plot happenings are finally revealed to you.

Vanilla Sky does not do what other masterpieces like Mulholland Drive do - it does not leave you dazed and confused at the end. But, in the process, it does twist and turn on itself so many times that reality and dreams mix and fuse, and the artistic beauty of the film is laid bare in all its glory. Vanilla Sky is not necessarily even one of Tom Cruise’s best performances ever, but it is salacious and nuanced nevertheless. Cameron Diaz is great as a psychopath, and Penelope Cruz is superb playing the main love interest (where she had played the psychopathic character in the original).

The beautiful analogies in this movie are there, alongside the impressive shot of an empty Times Square, for which the City of New York gave the filmmakers a very limited window. Just open your eyes.

3. A.I. Artificial Intelligence This is nowhere close to Steven Spielberg’s best film. Sensing a theme yet? But when it comes to movies set at least 85 years from now, it is definitely one of the best.

The movie is, in a way, bizarre and self-indulgent. But, upon revisiting it, what sticks out is that the focus is not on the humans' own interactions with artificial intelligence, but the reverse. It is not the anxieties of the human race over robotic interaction (think, I, Robot), but the anxieties of machines over humans. In the meantime, the movie portrays a realistic future in which climate change has severely diminished human control of the planet (doing so at a time, 2001, when it was still not a fad to talk about climate change), and does not exaggerate the technological advances it envisions.

A.I. is, in a way, Spielberg’s response to Kubrick’s 2001 (indeed, the movie had been in development with Kubrick as director up until he turned it over to Spielberg a few years before his death), and while it did not achieve the majestic status of that movie, it is perhaps one of the most thoughtful depictions of what life could be like in the century that most of us will not witness.

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