“It’s amazing how prescient The Running Man is.”
“Seems like, if they were really prescient, they would have known not to waste a Colman Domingo performance.”
“Not the remake. The original 1987 film, with Yaphet Kotto.”
“Right but how hard is it to foresee that an authoritarian government would use media and entertainment to distract the masses and control the country?”
“Not just that. The film foresaw prediction markets. They had AI slop and altered videos. They had an attorney general poking his crooked little finger into TV production to influence the narrative. That’s the reality we are now living in.”
“True, but if I remember the film’s ending correctly, the rebels flash a few videos on screen debunking that narrative, with the message ‘Killian is lying to you,’ and everyone suddenly turns into freedom fighters. In our reality, known in the multiverse as the dumbest timeline, it has been shown over and over and over and over again that the President lies again and again and again, and yet there are people who still support him. Or they are at least unwilling to stand up against him.”
“To be fair, the film had to compress a few things to get under two hours.”
“If they wanted a more realistic ending, they should have listened to Senator Roark delivering the eulogy for our times:
Power comes from the lie. Lying big and getting the whole damn world to play along with ya. Once you got everybody agreeing with what they know in their hearts ain’t true, you’ve got ’em by the balls.”
