THE FILMS: Network (1976, Sidney Lumet), A Face in the Crowd (1957, Elia Kazan), Contagion (2011, Steven Soderbergh)
THE CONNECTION: Films which now seem to have predicted the future.
THE THINKING: Quite a few films are looked at today as having predicted some aspect of the future. Whether it’s HAL 9000 in 2001: A Space Odyssey foreseeing the AI we use today, or the online data theft Sandra Bullock’s The Net so unfortunately envisioned, creative filmmakers have always had an eye toward what was to come—either knowingly or unknowingly. A lot of these films are considered science fiction, but the three films in this week’s triple feature aren’t fantastic; they’re cautionary tales of culture gone wrong, and in one case an all-too-real world response to a global virus.