Science fiction is an exploration of ideas and the act of turning the impossible into the possible. Much of the genre has predicted technology that we use today. Star Trek presented the Communicator, a device used for voice communication from a distance. Now we have mobile phones with telecommunications stretching across continents. Fantastical elements are still on the drawing board, like teleportation and flying cars, but they continue to excite the imagination and propel reality towards the future.
“The future,” as Doc Brown said in Back to the Future: Part III, “isn’t written yet! So make it a good one.” That is the goal for a levelheaded futurist. However, the future spectrum is known to reach extremes: stark white utopian or stark black dystopian. The Terminator franchise holds the future in a stranglehold, in a fight between man and machine. Logan’s Run peddles a dystopian society that is a masked utopia. Not all futures are the same as they are both prone and immune to change. The volatile nature of time can go stunted for a future of sameness that can only be described as bleak.
MOVIEWEB VIDEO OF THE DAY
10 2081 (2009)
The Moving Picture Institute
Based on the 1961 short story “Harrison Bergeron” by Kurt Vonnegut, the featurette takes place in the year 2081, and everyone is finally equal. The premise is to ensure equality erases the concepts of minority and majority. This idea is accepted by the masses, who are governed by Handicappers who enforce the wearing of masks, weights, and ear radios for those too beautiful, too strong, and too smart. No difference, just sameness, a misappropriated meaning given to a word that used to be known as equality. Harrison (Armie Hammer) challenges his bonds and shows everyone what true freedom looks like despite its manipulated cost.
MOVIEWEB VIDEO OF THE DAY
MOVIEWEB VIDEO OF THE DAY
MOVIEWEB VIDEO OF THE DAY
9 A Clockwork Orange (1971)
Warner Bros. Pictures
Droogs, milk, and ultra-violence are all you need in life. Anthony Burgess’ 1962 novel’s antisocial antihero Alex DeLarge (Malcolm McDowell) commits crimes with his demented pals in dystopian Britain. They subvert any semblance of order and sense, favoring chaotic control. They are the catalyst for moral declension and juvenile delinquency, which find their way into societal systems that in turn control them through conditioning. The vicious cycle of independence and dependence forces you to see the lines drawn in the sand and how easily those lines can be erased. It leaves you questioning the “goodness” of things, whether that goodness is trapping or saving society.
8 Blade Runner (1982)
Warner Bros.
Adapted from Philip K. Dick’s 1968 novel Do Androids Dream of Electric Sheep?, the science fiction neo-noir thriller with cyberpunk elements deals with man and machine. A group of rogue replicants have escaped their manufactured existence and begin to exude human qualities. Police officer Rick Deckard (Harrison Ford) comes out of retirement to discern and arrest the replicants before they can hide on Earth in plain sight. When Deckard comes face to face with advanced replicant Roy Batty (Rutger Hauer) who is designed with a short operating life span, Batty delivers a timeless soliloquy about death and dying, passes on mercy in an unforgiving world, and speaks to the finite roles we play in this life.
7 Brazil (1985)
Universal Pictures
Brazil predicts a tech-dependent future of industrialists in which one’s worth is decided by their technical prowess and service to bureaucratic, corporate systems. Wayward dreamer and government worker Sam Lowry (Jonathan Pryce) realizes that an arrest warrant was misprinted due to a caught fly in the mechanism. He wants to report the mistake for due justice, but rather than correct the cogs in the wheel, the powers that be instead continue to run their business and ignore their ramifications, and forgo concern for the individual. The ends justify the means and technicalities are hypocritically made pedantic and self-serving in this prophetic, technocratic, and consumerist black comedy.
6 Cloverfield (2008)
Paramount Pictures
In life, there are no guarantees, except the impending doom of a creature named Clover. The alien invades an unprepared Earth in this monster film, leaving found-footage behind in the wake of its destruction. New York is reduced to rubble and people have either been displaced or killed by the invader from another world. A last-ditch effort to kill the monster by bombing all of Manhattan goes awry, and the freak without a leash continues to wreak havoc long after the credits have rolled.
5 Dr. Strangelove or: How I Learned to Stop Worrying and Love the Bomb (1964)
Columbia Pictures
The satirized Cold War and nuclear conflict between the United States and the Soviet Union takes on juvenile tensions and aggressions. From the safety of the War Room (unless an ironic fight breaks out in its close quarters), the U.S. president and his senior leaders bunker down as they awkwardly try to prevent their Air Force general from starting nuclear warfare with the Soviets. The power-hungry countries cannot help themselves and end up playing a miscommunication-filled game of telephone that turns rain into bombs.
4 Never Let Me Go (2010)
Fox Searchlight Pictures
Sharing a similar age-based plot with Logan’s Run, the tragic film tells the story of childhood friends who discover they are to become organ donors in their young adulthood. Their boarding school classmates also share their likenesses, leading them to learn that they are all clones. They try to delay the inevitable and fight for human rights via a deferral system, but no one can escape the truth: we live to die.
3 Nineteen Eighty-Four (1984)
20th Century Fox
George Orwell’s 1949 novel of dark dystopia features a totalitarian superstate called Oceania. Their governance, the Thought Police and Big Brother of the Ministry of Truth, controls all facets of life. Winston Smith (John Hurt) is a free thinker among the mouth-breathers droning on with work and accepting restrictions as freedoms. He attempts to live an idyllic and independent life, but is rehabilitated into a doublethink reality before he becomes nonexistent or, in ominous novel speak, an “unperson.”
2 Planet of the Apes (1968)
Space-faring astronaut George Taylor (Charlton Heston) travels ahead of time and finds himself in the year 3978 on a planet belonging to talking apes. Humans have turned into primitive, mute animals and are subjected to scientific experiments. When the speaking human is discovered, ape civilization is turned on its head. A battle of the species is revealed to have taken place on Earth during his space voyage, leaving our stranded astronaut on a dystopian, ape-ruled Earth.
1 THX 1138 (1971)
Before the sensational space opera that was Star Wars, George Lucas made THX 1138. With its clinical and foreboding dystopia, nameless, emotionless, faithless, and sexless people are slaves to mind-altering drugs and their jobs. THX 1138 (Robert Duvall) is a factory worker forced to produce android police officers that enforce his limited life. He stops taking drugs, has sex, and ends up at the city limits, where he crawls up a vent to discover that society has lived underground and that the surface of Earth is uninhabitable.
