Movies that are most closest and similar to real life, but NOT based on a true story
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Children of Men
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Gattaca
Both feel like extremely realistic portrayals of possible near futures.
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The Martian.
Aside from the macguffin that left Matt Damon stranded, the science was solid. Furthermore, the casual dysfunctionality and administrative infighting of the governments and agencies was brilliantly on point.
Contagion.
Writers Crystal balled that shit
There’s a submarine comedy called Down Periscope from the 90s. The story is, of course, absolute ridiculousness (albeit highly entertaining ridiculousness).
I’ve repeatedly been told by navy veterans, however, that it comes closest to portraying actual life in the navy - in particular, that virtually every character in the film is someone you can (and likely will) actually encounter in the navy.
My dad was in the Navy (submariner) in the 80s and he loves that movie. He told me they didn’t do the thing with the string like they do in the movie … Instead they strung it up when they were at depth and took bets on when it would break on the way back up.
You couldn’t pay me enough to be that far underwater.
WarGames. Everything but the AI was very realistic. (Well, also except for the fact that the movie’s NORAD headquarters was apparently way fancier than it was in real life.)
I really like Run (2020). I really don’t wanna spoil a single bit, you should go watch it.
Office Space. Although, it is a little too real sometimes.
Even though I havent seen the movie, I heard about the birthday cake scene.
The other week staff member had a birthday, when she wasnt there. So we all had cake, while the birthday person didnt.
Idiocracy. We’re basically dumping brawndo on the plants as we speak…
Idiocracy is an entertaining comedy, but it isn’t realistic in the slightest.
Idiocracy uses a eugenicist premise (and the problem with that premise is a whole can of worms unto itself) to set up a world where everyone is an idiot, no exceptions. But they’re well-meaning idiots, and they have enough sense to be able to defer to the one and only smart guy in the room who ultimately saves the day.
The real world is suffering not because the people in power are stupid, but because the people in power are selfish and evil, and because they are smart enough to manipulate people who are dumber than them. There’s only one exception here, but the one guy who is a true idiot is a puppet being controlled by smart evil people.
TV shows almost look like OW MY BALLS today; with newer smart TVs injecting ads into content that isn’t even theirs.
We’ve got a president doing McDonalds buffets for events, suggesting people “inject light” into their veins for medical intervention, wanting to rename greenland to “Red White and Blueland”…
Nah. That shit hits far too close to home.
And if other animals can be bred for specific traits, so can humans. We’re not special in any way regarding that. Rejecting that because of how it was incorrectly used to justify horrible things in the past is flat out unscientific.
The idea of smart people going extinct is simply not how genetics works. That is flat out unscientific.
If we bred for it, we could make it happen. That’s the point.
Also, it isn’t unscientific. They’ve done it in rat/mouse studies. Look up mouse utopia. We aren’t immune to social collapse. As a species we aren’t that smart to begin with. It’s our social structure, public schooling, etc that allow us to advance early age and maintain the higher order thought that our society continues to have. When shit goes sideways, kids don’t have public schools any more, etc – you’ll see how stupid genetically, we all are.
I have friends, who are legitimately “mentally stunted” because they weren’t taught language due to a neglective environment.
Nothing you’ve just described has anything to do with genetics. You’re talking about nurture, not nature.
The premise of Idiocracy, that this setting came about because dumb people had too much sex, is fundamentally flawed. That isn’t how genetics work and it isn’t how intelligence works.
And look, for a work of fiction I can suspend disbelief on the premise and still enjoy the story told in that setting, I’m not even saying it isn’t a funny movie, but realistic is not a word that can be applied to any part of the film.
Honestly, I think the movie would’ve been improved if you chopped off the intro and just reduced it to “Man gets isekai’d into a world where everyone’s stupid because that’s just what this fictional world is.”
That isn’t how genetics work and it isn’t how intelligence works.
On a simplified level, it absolutely is. If having more kids gives an evolutionary advantage, and being unintelligent is part of that caste, then absolutely the children will be born with a lower capacity for intelligence.
Look at Huskeys vs other dogs. Massive, MASSIVE difference in personality, intelligence, energy, etc.
And they aren’t a different species either - it takes fractions of a % of difference in DNA to produce huge swings in things like intelligence.
If we share something like 90% of our DNA with monkeys, it’s not going to take an entire speciation to measure intelligence differences. This is a lie told by people who pretend to be scientists, but are more interested in the moral implications of confirming than they are truth and facts. Yes, telling people you can control the genetic population of the species to push for certain outcomes within the species in a dangerous thing. We get that. But that is the truth of the matter, not some fairy-tale that we’re all kumbyah and that every genetically distinct population doesn’t have advantages and disadvantages (of which there are hundreds or thousands of distinct genetic populations within the h. sapien species; If you’re a pacific islander, a DNA test can tell you exactly what island you originate from).
Sure, on an individual level - people as single data-points can fall upon that distribution, but you absolutely can shift that distribution up or down.
Granted, doing genetic control like this comes with its own incredibly dangerous set of consequences such as amplification of mutant genome, because you would be controlling for 1 trait, but missing the other millions of traits/genetic markers that you need to keep diverse in order to keep the human body working. – Again, using dogs as a reference here, how most dalmations have hearing problems or are completely deaf because when their line was bred, they were controlling for the patterning, not other genetic defects.
If anything, better education would genetically select in favor of more stupid people. If you’re stupid and can get by because of a phenomenal education then guess being stupid was smart enough.
Whether what you’ve described is actually how things work or not (it’s not) doesn’t matter though. Because breeding entire populations takes thousands of years and will not solve any of our problems today. It’s really not worth talking about.
Don’t Look Up
There are a bajillion, but maybe you are looking for a specific genre that nails it on the head.
As someone mentioned, there are thousands of social drama films that could’ve easily happened. The success of that type of film is selling a “day in the life” plot.
Someone else mentioned Office Space. That film is a satire, but it condenses and delivers refined representations of the banality of cubicle life that we all can easily relate to. The characters truly seem to be facsimiles of people we’ve known in our working lives.
Someone else mentioned Michael Clayton. It’s an excellent thriller with flawed characters with believable motives that yes, it could be real. And maybe something like that has happened?
What genre will help us answer your question?
The Room
Yeah, it really does match the incoherent conversations and relationships that a lot of people have in a way that most scripted movies don’t.
It doesn’t make for a good movie, but when I did watch it the characters reminded me of people I knew.
- Tinker Tailor Soldier Spy
- Civil War
- The Ides of March
- Michael Clayton
- A Most Wanted Man
Fargo is not a true story, though some of it was inspired by true events (wood chipper)
I got called to Minnesota to serve two years as an LDS missionary back in 2000. I absolutely loved the place. But my first day was I was stationed in Brainerd MN, and my apartment was on the edge of a frozen lake. I took a picture of it, and colored in the old brick BBQ to look like a wood chipper with feet sticking out of the top, and a large red stain across the ice, and sent it to my sister. That picture sat in her cubicle for years after that. I can’t think of that scene without thinking of it.
That’s amazing
Probably would have to be the movie Rubber.
