the higher lens : 16
Why the Future in Film No Longer Feels New
Contemporary cinema continues to insist on the future as its object. Artificial intelligence, post-human worlds, algorithmic governance, and technologically saturated environments dominate the screen. Yet the experience of watching these futures is increasingly marked by familiarity rather than disruption. The images arrive already intelligible. They do not unsettle our sense of time so much as confirm it. The future, paradoxically, feels known.
This is not simply a matter of creative stagnation or exhausted genres. It reflects a deeper transformation in how futurity itself is being imagined and produced. As artificial intelligence becomes embedded within the infrastructure of filmmaking , from concept design and script development to editing, voice modulation, and visual effects - the future on screen is no longer speculative in the strong sense. It is assembled retrospectively, drawn from vast archives of existing images, styles, and narrative forms. What appears as futurism is increasingly an act of recombination.
Cinema has always relied on repetition. Genres stabilise through recognisable conventions; styles emerge through variation rather than radical invention. Yet earlier cinematic futures were speculative precisely because they exceeded precedent. They gestured toward worlds that felt strange, excessive, or unresolved. Their power lay in their resistance to immediate interpretation. By contrast, AI-assisted image production privileges coherence, recognisability, and optimisation. It extrapolates from what has already been culturally validated. The future becomes less an opening than a refinement.
This shift has important philosophical consequences. As Walter Benjamin argued, mechanical reproduction altered the conditions under which art could be experienced, diminishing the aura that attached to singular works. Artificial intelligence represents a further development: it does not merely reproduce artworks, but reproduces the conditions of creativity itself. When the tools used to imagine the future are trained on the past, novelty becomes structurally constrained. The new is filtered through what has already been legible, successful, and safe.
The result is a form of recursive futurism. Futures on screen increasingly resemble simulations of earlier cinematic futures rather than speculative engagements with the unknown. This dynamic recalls Jean Baudrillard’s account of simulation, in which images no longer refer to an external reality but to other images in an endless loop of self-reference. AI intensifies this condition. The future ceases to function as a horizon of possibility and instead becomes an aesthetic echo chamber.
This helps explain why many contemporary science-fiction films feel emotionally thin despite their technical sophistication. The issue is not a lack of feeling, but a lack of tension. Moral conflicts are resolved too cleanly, visual environments are internally consistent to the point of sterility, and narrative rhythms are calibrated to prevent discomfort. Ambiguity, which once played a central role in cinema’s engagement with futurity, is treated as inefficiency. What disappears is not spectacle, but uncertainty.
The cultural significance of this shift becomes clearer when placed alongside broader conditions of production. Recent reporting on Hollywood’s integration of AI technologies shows how rapidly these tools are being normalised, even as public resistance frames them in existential terms. Protest slogans declaring AI “soulless” express a genuine anxiety, but they risk obscuring the deeper transformation underway. The central issue is not whether machines can create art, but how creative decisions are increasingly governed by predictive systems that privilege continuity over rupture.
Mark Fisher described contemporary culture as haunted by “lost futures”: visions of what might have been imagined but never arrived. AI accelerates this condition by turning cultural stagnation into an infrastructural feature. When repetition is efficient and novelty is risky, imagination is subtly redirected toward optimisation. The future becomes something to be managed rather than ventured into.
This transformation also reshapes cinema’s relationship to time. Film has historically been capable of disrupting temporal experience , slowing it, suspending it, or fracturing linear causality. In his work on cinema, Gilles Deleuze argued that film could generate “time-images” that opened space for reflection rather than action. AI-assisted production, by contrast, tends to smooth time. Silence, slowness, and unresolved duration are increasingly marginalised in favour of flow, clarity, and resolution.
There is a profound irony at work here. At a moment when technological change is accelerating in ways that destabilise social, ethical, and economic frameworks, cinema’s imaginative capacity appears to be contracting. The future on screen lags behind lived experience not because reality has become less complex, but because the mechanisms used to visualise it are structurally conservative. Trained on what has been, they struggle to give form to what has no precedent.
What is ultimately at stake is not the fate of cinema as an industry, but its role as a medium of possibility. A future that feels familiar is one that feels already decided. When imagination becomes recursive, anticipation gives way to recognition. Cinema risks losing one of its most critical functions: not to predict the future accurately, but to estrange us from the present and open space for thinking otherwise.
If the future in film no longer feels new, it is not because the future itself has closed, but because our images of it have. The challenge is not to abandon new technologies, but to resist allowing them to determine the limits of imagination. Without such resistance, the future on screen will continue to arrive already known , precisely because it has been assembled from what we already are.
By Vlera Gara