Looking Forward—From the Past: Retro Futuresex Flicks Worth Checking Out
Sexually intriguing sci-fi from when “cyber” was cool
Though popular and widely respected, particularly among fans who appreciate their frequently disturbing erotic imagery, directors like David and Brandon Cronenberg aren’t the only filmmakers who’ve dared point their cinematic imaginations towards an exciting view of what life—and sex—might be like in the years ahead.
Since many of the following movies were released nearly twenty years ago, their future is closer to today than tomorrow. Even so they’re entertaining and even offer up a bevy of quite frequently fascinating, sexually speculative ideas.
XChange (2000)
Its budget may have been small, but when it comes to fast-forwarding the imagination, few films can match XChange. For starters, it revolves around an up-and-coming technology that enables person A to switch minds, even over long distances, with person B.
Think telepresence, but instead of inhabiting a robot, you’d instead take someone else’s body for a spin. The plot twists when Toffler (played by Kim Coates) swaps with Kyle MacLachlan’s criminally nasty Fisk. On the run from the cops, Toffler resorts to hiding his consciousness in a mass-produced synthetic (Stephen Baldwin) with a built-in 24-hour lifespan.
While not perhaps not Oscar-worthy, XChange’s plethora of cyberdelic details and erotically enthralling possibilities is surprisingly enthralling and well worth hunting down.
Gene Generation (2007)
As icky as it is sexually provocative, Gene Generation goes where science fiction movies rarely venture, showing what happens to people and the society they inhabit when we can reshape our bodies however and whenever anyone desires.
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Starring the striking Bai Ling as an professional assassin trying to protect her brother (Parry Shen) from ruthless DNA Hackers, Gene Generation’s overall aesthetic tends toward the slick, wet, and generally disgusting while managing—largely due to Bai Ling’s performance— to be erotically enchanting.
On the subject of genetic engineering, we’ve also speculated about everything from grown, not made sextech playthings to sexually super changing our bodies.
Avatar (2004)
Sharing a title and nothing else with James Cameron’s films, Avatar—also sometimes known as Cyber Wars or Matrix Hunter—is one of those unexpected treasures, like XChange, that understands you don’t need tens of millions of dollars to tell an intriguing-futuristic, sexually-enthralling story.
Dash MacKenzie (Genevieve O’Reilly), a classic forced-out-of retirement bounty hunter who ends up a mega-corporation’s crosshairs.
Virtual reality is another favorite topic of ours, which makes Avatar such a welcome addition to our list as rather than focusing on clunky hardware, it instead gives us a world where slipping in and out of cyberspace is as easy as stepping from one room to another.
Plus, it gets a special kudo for sensitively showing how our physical selves don’t need to mirror our digital avatars—and how this could be emotionally and sexually liberating for people with physical limitations.
Strange Days (1995)
On the subject of Cameron, his two-time Academy Award-winning ex-wife Kathryn Bigelow helmed our next entry, a chaotically sprawling whodunnit set during the last riotous days of 1999.
The speculative sextech side of Strange Days revolves around an illicit memory recording device, to which ex-vice cop Lenny Nero (Ralph Fiennes) has become hopelessly addicted, endlessly replaying when he and Faith (Juliette Lewis) were together.
Thematically akin to Douglas Trumbull’s equally excellent 1983 Brainstorm, Strange Days doesn’t shy away from the good and potentially not-so-good sides of this sort of technology—each raising the possibility of user addiction: emotional, sexual, or both.
That said, the idea of sharing memories and experiences is the stuff erotic dreams are made of. It’s just unfortunate Strange Days, aside from an extremely brief scene, doesn’t take time to explore how this technology might positively affect the future of human sexuality. Hopefully, other filmmakers will someday pick up the flag from Bigelow and Trumbull and take it into a more optimistic direction.
Tomorrow’s sexuality—yesterday!
Big-budget cinema experiences certainly have their place, but remember, as with any other medium, there are unexpectedly arousing erotic speculative future treasures out there waiting to be discovered and enjoyed.
If you have some you’re particularly excited by but may have slipped our attention, please feel free to share their titles in the comments!
Image Sources: Depositphotos, IMDB
