Welcome to 2025! 1988’s ‘Future Hunters’ Thought We’d Be Dead By Now

As we wander into 2025, perplexed, slightly worse for wear and readying ourselves for a new presidency, it’s terribly difficult to know what to expect from the next 12 months. There are those of us who will try and make predictions based on financial forecasts, political analysis and cultural criticism. And there are those of us who would rather see what weird old sci-fi movies have to say about it.

This year, as part of a now-annual KQED Arts tradition, I will be sharing the predictions of Future Hunters, a post-apocalyptic sci-fi/kung fu/romance/adventure (you heard me) set in 2025. And initially? Well, things don’t look so great for us, to be honest.

Here are the first words, spoken in sinister voiceover, that you hear in Future Hunters:

It is the year 2025, almost 40 years since the great holocaust. A once proud world has been reduced to ruin, famine and despair in the bitter aftermath of war. Now mankind’s last frail hope lies in a fabled object which has the power to turn back time and to perhaps undo the evil that has befallen the world. That object is the Spear of Longinus, the spear which pierced the body of Christ on the cross and which holds the very power of creation itself.

I’m going to give you a minute to read all of that again on account of how deranged it is.

Got it? Good.

Now, I must admit that I got rather excited when I found out that the (alleged) real-life parts of the Spear of Longinus live in Rome, Vienna, Vagharshapat and Antioch. But then I also found out that the spear is in Antioch, Syria, not Antioch, Contra Costa County — and that’s significantly less convenient to get to. Sorry, everyone, we might not be able to easily overcome all the perils of 2025. Bummer.

After the bleak voiceover, what ensues in Future Hunters is basically one very prolonged fight sequence. On the plus side, it’s also the kind of fight sequence in which people get shot and then do elegant somersaults off stairs, or dramatic shimmies down into lying positions. Honestly, if this is what fighting in 2025 is going to look like, sign me up! (This is mere steps away from West Side Story. I don’t know about you, but I’ve always wanted to snap my fingers menacingly in a group setting.)

Anyway, this ripped, oily dude named Matthew retrieves the Spear of Longinus from a temple, and somehow gets transported back to 1986 so he might save the Earth. Instead, he immediately rescues a woman named Michelle from three rapey biker-men. Then Matthew dies from unspecified injuries, but not before explaining to Michelle that she must find a man named Hightower and use the spear to save the world. She signs on to do this remarkably quickly. (This sounds very time-consuming, Michelle…)

Michelle’s boyfriend Slade (who is played by Robert Patrick, the speedy little metal man from Terminator 2) is tougher to get on board. He only starts believing Michelle’s story when goons and baddies start following them, gratuitously smashing nearby chairs and demanding she hand over the spear. (It is entirely unclear how any of these men found Michelle and know she has the spear, but hey, minor plot details, am I right?) Michelle and Slade find out that there’s a professor named Hightower in Hong Kong, so they immediately travel there because no one has a job in this movie.

Michelle and Slade are picked up at the Hong Kong airport by an old friend of Slade’s named Liu. The actor playing this character is credited as Bruce Li, lest we don’t immediately recognize how much he resembles a young Bruce Lee. Then this scene happens for no reason other than to provide Bruce Li with a forum to show off his fighting skills:

(And yes, every fight scene in this whole movie has comedic sound effects attached to every punch and kick. It’s really delightful, honestly.)

Then Michelle and Slade go to Manila (again: no jobs, apparently!) where they find Hightower — wouldn’t you know it?! — right before he gets blown up by some comic book Nazis. Many, many, many chases ensue and the spear changes hands several times. Along the way, there’s swimming, parachuting, rainforest hikes, sword-fighting, rolling down hills, a “pit of death,” crossing rivers via both tree trunk and rope bridge, some kind of earthquake, a crew of Amazonian women with perfect eyeshadow, offensive representations of Indigenous people, and a bizarre side-quest that I don’t even have the strength to explain. Plus snakes, alligators, speeding horses and yes, more Nazis. Naturally.

As you might have already gathered, Future Hunters feels an awful lot like what would happen if the makers of The A-Team, Indiana Jones and Romancing the Stone all got together to make up a story as they went along, while also inhaling copious amounts of methamphetamine. It is beyond every conceivable standard of preposterous. I’ll not tell you the ending except to say that the movie never does make it back to 2025 to see if Michelle and Slade really fix things or not. (Get it together, meth people!)

With all that in mind, there’s not much more I can tell you with certainty about Future Hunters’ predictions for 2025. Because it is so utterly entrenched in 1986, this movie will, at the very least, remind you just how much better we actually have it in 2025. We live in a time when non-white characters can appear in movies without spears in their hands. We live in a time when female leads aren’t repeatedly almost raped (four times this happens to Michelle! Four!) just so there’s an excuse to kind of, sort of expose her breasts. And we live in a time when special effects people try really, really hard not to flagrantly reveal that a brick building on set is actually made of cardboard.

So yes, in 2025, we’ve got a mountain of problems — economic, social and otherwise. But we’ve also got infinitely better entertainment than Future Hunters (or the 1980s on the whole, to be honest) and for that, we should all be grateful.