In the year 2020, the city of Venice has been transformed into a toxic ghost city, rendered uninhabitable by catastrophic industrial pollution. While the surface is a cordoned-off wasteland, an intricate network of tunnels beneath the city serves as a base for the Tubular Corporation, an entity ostensibly working on environmental reclamation but actually harboring darker motives. The world above is implied to be a struggling, high-tech society that relies on militarized corporate entities to manage the fallout of ecological decay.

The film’s dynamics center on the intersection of corporate malfeasance and biological catastrophe. It is eventually revealed that the Tubular Corporation intentionally exacerbated the pollution to manipulate real estate values and clear the city for their own private research. This research led to the accidental creation of bio-mechanical monsters—mutated humans and creatures that mimic the traits of their surroundings. Earth is depicted as a planet where the line between natural biology and industrial waste has blurred, leading to a localized apocalypse driven by greed rather than accidental scientific error.

As a prediction of 2020, Terminator II (also known as Shocking Dark) reflects late-1980s anxieties regarding industrial waste and corporate unaccountability. While Venice remains inhabited today, the film's vision of a city evacuated due to environmental toxicity echoes modern concerns over rising sea levels and urban decay. The technological predictions, such as human-passing androids (the character Samuel Fuller) and instantaneous time travel used as a last-resort escape, remain speculative. Analysis-quality sources note that the film's vision is less an original forecast and more a pastiche of contemporary sci-fi tropes, specifically those found in Aliens and The Terminator, though its specific focus on the deliberate destruction of a heritage city for profit offers a cynical take on 21st-century capitalism.