Review: 'The Future Is Now: Madmen, Mavericks, and the Epic Sci-Fi Summer of 1982'

Even though pretty much everyone loved it, Star Wars became an easy go-to villain for every dreary movie critic who'd come to complain that it ruined cinematic art by making special effects and bottom line far more important than story, complex themes, and characterizations. Nevertheless, it took a few years for the influence of George Lucas's film to really ripen. Aside from a few stray extravaganzas like Superman, Alien, and Raiders of the Lost Ark, the Star Wars influence was mostly manifest in grade-Z schlockers like Star Crash and Battle Beyond the Stars in the years immediately following the summer of '77. 

In his new book The Future Is Now, Chris Nashawaty essentially sets out to prove that that year of ripening was 1982. The spring/summer season of that year saw the release of no less than eight special-effects laden, major-studio genre movies: Star Trek II: The Wrath of Khan, Conan the Barbarian, Blade Runner, Tron, Poltergiest, The Road Warrior, The Thing, and E.T.: The Extra-Terrestrial. Not all of these movies were mad successes. Before its recent nostalgia-based revisionism--which is now afforded to every old movie, even if it's as dire as Clue, The Monster Squad or Hocus Pocus--Tron was lumped in among Disney's embarrassing flops of the early eighties. Despite becoming far more deserving of the cult classic status it now enjoys, The Thing performed more poorly at the box office and critics hated its bleakness. The most ostensibly high-brow of the summer's genre pictures, Blade Runner, was too joyless and tedious for most tastes.

Nevertheless, all of these movies brought something fairly long-lasting to genre films. Even the stinker Tron (the only one of these movies I could never bring myself to sit through) can probably be blamed for the unapologetically digital effects work that would come to conquer moviemaking. And some, like E.T., Poltergeist, The Thing, and Wrath of Khan, were genuinely terrific movies.

You could get a juicy book out of any one of these films, so it must have been something of a challenge for Nashawaty to cover eight of them in one fairly slim volume, but the author remains focused enough that you don't feel as though you're ending up with nothing more than a morsel of a potential meal. Nashawaty is mainly concerned with how this particular year ended up being the one in which the genre bubble finally reached full size and its films completed all that which Star Wars began. Yet we not only get a lot of satisfying information about the eight films on which he focuses but also ones that led to their making, such as Close Encounters of the Third Kind, Dark Star, Star Trek: The Motion Picture, Alien, and, of course, Star Wars. While The Future Is Now could have easily swelled to three times its published length without losing an iota of zing, or even moved a bit beyond July of '82 (Dark Crystal, where art thou?), what's here deserves to become a must-read for genre movie fans as much as The Thing deserved to become the genre classic it ultimately became.