One of the great delights of revisiting old science-fiction films is the chance to ponder how close humanity has actually come to realizing the visions of the future they present.

Sometimes the filmmakers get it right — the artificial-intelligence-driven HAL 9000 in Stanley Kubrick’s 2001: A Space Odyssey (1968), for example. And sometimes they’re wildly wrong — we’re looking at you, Back to the Future Part II (1989), and your flying cars and hoverboards that are yet to become an everyday reality. Regardless, the genre has always given its audiences pause for thought.

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The upcoming Future Vision series of movies and talks at the Hong Kong Science Museum hopes to do the same.

Organized by the Film Programmes Office and the museum, the four-film program marks both the latter’s 35th anniversary and the opening of its new InnoTech, Living Tech and AI galleries.

Four films — Gattaca (1997), Bicentennial Man (1999), WALL-E (2008), and Tomorrowland (2015) — have been selected for screening. Each show is followed by a top Hong Kong scientist “exploring the science concepts behind the films with the audience”.

“These films connect with the topics that the museum’s new exhibition galleries talk about, and we hope that we can inspire the audience and also encourage them to think, and have further discussions,” says Yvonne Tse, a manager at the Film Programmes Office, part of the city’s Leisure and Cultural Services Department.

For example, in the Brad Bird-directed blockbuster Tomorrowland, George Clooney is a disillusioned inventor who travels to another dimension. The film presents a spectacular vision of a city of the future — though some might say that it looks curiously like modern-day Singapore — and the technology that drives it.

Following its screening on Saturday, it’s over to Shum Ho-cheung, vice-president (research) and chair professor of chemical and biomedical Engineering at the City University of Hong Kong. During his lecture, Cheung promises to dig into how the film is “closely linked to today’s soft matter technologies”, and how such “optimistic science” might help “build a better tomorrow”.

Tse points out that Tomorrowland — which encourages viewers to think about lesser-known technologies such as quantum computing, as well as some innovations that are yet to materialize — resonates with exhibits in the museum’s InnoTech Gallery.

The Andrew Niccol-directed Gattaca stars Ethan Hawke as a man who tries to pass himself off as having the genetic qualities required for space travel. The film looks closely at genetic engineering, and the moral issues surrounding it.

Wong Siu-lun, an associate professor at the School of Biomedical Sciences, the University of Hong Kong, will introduce “the basic mechanism of genome editing, its diverse applications in real-life and biomedicine, and discuss the related ethical implications” after a screening of Gattaca on April 26.

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Tse invites viewers to explore the museum galleries and consider which parts of the films they have watched “are not fiction anymore”, adding, “There are also things that could become a reality in the very near future, and we hope this inspires everyone to engage in further discussions.”

If you go

Future Vision

Dates: Saturday and April 26

Venue: Hong Kong Science Museum, 2 Science Museum Road, Tsim Sha Tsui East, Kowloon

https://www.lcsd.gov.hk/fp/en/listing.html?id=91

The writer is a freelance contributor to China Daily.