Cloud Atlas and 4 Other Unusual Sci-Fi Movies Made in the Historical Setting
Science fiction projects in which characters travel backward in time.
We tend to view science fiction as stories about humanity moving forward. However, science fiction also envisions and successfully depicts a return to the past, when history unfolds before our eyes.
1. Prey, 2022
Transferring sci-fi plots to the past has always created an interesting contrast. One particularly effective example is Prey, in which the encounter with the Predator takes place in a setting 300 years ago.
A Comanche warrior woman fights an alien. In battle, the alien's technology merged with the primitive energy of the hunters, who are locked in a single food chain.
Prey is considered one of the most original and exotic films in the Predator universe – the reason for this is precisely the effective genre hybrid.
2. Cloud Atlas, 2012
The Wachowski sisters' project has been called the most ambitious sci-fi film of recent decades. Cloud Atlas is notable for how its narrative cleverly rearranges blocks of time to tell a universal story about human connections.
The movie turns to 1849, when a notary overcomes a difficult sea voyage; to 1936, where the relationship between two talented composers is at the center; and to 1973, where the film plunges into the neo-noir madness of a journalist who got involved in the affairs of an energy corporation.
3. The Prestige, 2006
Christopher Nolan's psychological drama has both historical and sci-fi dimensions. At the turn of the 20th century, Nikola Tesla develops a teleportation machine and tests it with the magician Robert Angier.
As a result, Tesla creates a device that produces duplicates of objects. The Prestige is a film that walks the fine line between fantastic fiction and clever trickery.
4. The Age of Adaline, 2015
In The Age of Adaline, Blake Lively plays a character who lives for an entire century while remaining young. This is due to a mysterious anomaly that occurred when lightning struck her car.
Thus, a woman from 1908 finds herself in a turbulent century, experiencing world wars, cultural upheavals, and innovations. Shining on the screen, eternally thirty years old – this is the fantastic key to Lee Toland Krieger's film.
The art department also reveals a kaleidoscope of eras through their painstaking work on the dresses.
5. Back to the Future Part III, 1990
Robert Zemeckis's Back to the Future franchise has roared through the past and future. The third film, in which Marty McFly travels back to 1885 to save Doc, seems to have gone the furthest.
Here, fantasy is intertwined with historical texture. The Indians do not give the arriving Marty any peace, and then the cavalry arrives.
Overall, it's an exotic time travel adventure: an '80s adventurer gets straight to the world of saloons, where railroads reign and gangs run amok in the Wild West.