I have been trying to go through the science fiction set in 2025 in chronological order of publication / release, but somehow missed this 1986 film and have circled back to it.

This is definitely one of those films that is in the so-bad-it’s-good category. Only the first ten minutes is actually set in 2025, which is (as has depressingly often been the case on screen and page) a devastated post-apocalyptic wilderness. Then the guy who looks like he is going to be the protagonist grabs the Spear of Longinus, which pierced the body of the crucified Christ, and is zoinked back to the present day (ie 1986) where he is fatally wounded, and with his dying breath charges a young couple, played by Robert Patrick and Linda Carol, with the quest of uniting the spearhead with its hidden, long-sundered shaft, and therefore (by a mechanism that is never made clear) preventing the end of civilisation.

Robert Patrick is pretty wooden in Terminator 2, which was made five years later, and he’s pretty wooden here. But his co-star Linda Carol, supposedly still a teenager at the time and with only the lead role in Reform School Girls under her belt, steals the show with action and commitment; she gets a lot of the combat scenes despite wearing an impractical dress, and also gets most of the (few) good lines, as the two of them battle Nazis, martial artists, midgets and finally Amazon warriors to fulfil their quest. (Actually in fairness the midgets turn out to be on their side.) Everything has been thrown in here, quite unapologetically. You can’t quite decide whether to give it 3 out of 10 for effect, or 9 out of 10 for effort.

Sadly this is the last of the four films I found with a 2025 setting (and which were made before 2005), but it’s good to end on a (relatively) high note, after Endgame (1983), Futuresport (1998) and Timecop 2: The Berlin Decision (2003) which were all pretty rubbish.

Set in 2025:
Television: The Outer Limits: The Duplicate Man (1964)
Film: Endgame (Bronx lotta finale) (1983); Future Hunters (1986); Futuresport (1998); Timecop 2: The Berlin Decision (2003)
Novels: 334 (1972); Titan (1979); The Running Man (1982); The Lake at the End of the World (1988); Tom Clancy’s Net Force Explorers: Virtual Vandals (1998); A Friend of the Earth (2000); The Peshawar Lancers (2002)
Comics: The Nikopol Trilogy: The Woman Trap (1986); Superman & Batman: Generations III #2: Doomsday Minus One (2003)