These are some of the increasingly plausible bleak futures Hollywood has envisioned for us in dystopian movies and TV.
You cant stab that guy who looked at you crosswise on the subway.
By nature, civilization implies burying a number of your primal human impulses so that maintain peace and order.
But what if things got out of hand?
Thatd be no good, right?
Put people in power, and the well-being of the citizens suddenly becomes the last thing they worry about.
They just want more power, and they want the masses to shut the hell up about it.
Even if such things never happened in real life, its still a rousing fantasy.
Im sorry, but to be honest I never likedBrave New Worldanyway.
For years, the film floundered in the PD ghetto.
My earliest version was so savagely panned and scanned that the title card read TROPOLI.
read more Metropolis: The Enduring Legacy of a Pop Modernist Dystopia
THe story is a deceptively simple one.
Then one day that sweet, good-hearted cutie-pie Maria shows up and starts putting ideas in the proles heads.
Most would vehemently deny this, but theres plenty of historical and cultural evidence proving my point.
The most notorious of these was 1933sGabriel Over the White House.
But when the president is in a terrible car accident and slips into a coma, something strange happens.
When he wakes up, it seems the simple political tool has been possessed by the angel Gabriel.
At the time, this was all seen as a very good and positive thing.
Look at that Mussolini in Italy, right?
The film received good reviews and did brisk box office.
Then wouldnt you know it?
That darn Hitler had to come along and spoil everything.
Wells screenplay for William Cameron Menzies big budgeted British production.
The rationality and technological advancement is presented as a grand and wondrous thing for the benefit of all mankind.
Its all zipping ahead too quickly, and the masses are exhausted, confused and scared.
THe first film adaptation of the cautionary 1948 novel didnt sit very well with Orwells widow.
(They did, however, change Goldsteins name to avoid any unnecessary complications.)
Its a far better and more brutal film than its reputation would have you believe.
Alphaville (1965)
Jean-Luc Godards New Wave sci-fi post-noir weirdie is a brilliant head-scratcher all around.
Caution was a kind of Continental answer to both James Bond and Philip Marlowe.
He was suave, tough, wisecracking, and drove a convertible.
Its a bit like Kubrick directingLethal Weapon 5, or Ingmar Bergman helming aStar Trekpicture.
Being Godard, no explanation is given, and intelligent viewers know better than to ask.
Godards emphasis here on the importance of controlling the language is even more directly relevant today.
That whole Vichy business and what have you, right?
Its likely something Bradbury never could have imagined.
In fact, most seem to be quite content there.
Too often today, its cited as merely a quaint, if adventurous and imaginative, time capsule.
Yes, well, you’re free to see where this is going.
So what happens when Colossus gets a little too big for his britches?
As in the best of the dystopian films of the era, there are no happy resolutions.
Face it, we are slaves to these damn things.
Work hard, increase production, prevent accidents, and be happy.
In the not terribly distant future, mankind lives in a massive, sterile, brightly-lit maze-like underground city.
And to be honest it doesnt have a whole lot new to say.
Reagan was in the White House after all, so it was doubly appropriate.
He couldnt get everything in, no, but what ended up on the screen was in the book.
Radford ignores this, and its for the best.
Politicians tend to be puppets who never really accomplish much of anything anyway.
Just go back and listen to Ned Beattys brilliant monologue inNetwork.
It was something Lang understood when he madeMetropolis, and Miller and Kershner understand it here too.
Yeah, I can see Honeywell or Apple, or Bechtel already having plans like that filed away.
Hell, Google saw no reason to wait.
Will Smith plays an Everyman who unwittingly finds himself in possession of a computer disc.
But unlike 1998, no one seems to give a damn.
To be fair, 15 years later a couple of his guesses have turned out to be pretty dead-on.
Interesting thing is, unlike other visionary sci-fi writers, such as Jules Verne or H.G.
Wells, few of Dicks imagined bleak futures have become reality.
In 2008, Hitachi began developing what it later termed its Visualization Predictive Crime Analytics system.
monitoring Facebook exchanges and Twitter posts for certain keywords).
This allows cops to access and interpret all this immediate data in a blink.
Emotions just cause trouble, and the masses are easier to control when they dont have any.
Hey wait a second.
Not much more than that to recommend it, though.
Governments should be afraid of the people.
terrorism) a mere four years after the World Trade Center came down.
It took mighty balls, but bless them.
But then I guess its based on a comic book.
Even more subversive is that its presented within this popcorn framework.
Luke Wilson stars as Cpl.
hovering around the sub-moronic level.
People are named after consumer products, and giant corporations have bought out the government and devastated the environment.
Anti-intellectualism runs rampant, which makes Bauers average intelligence immediately suspect.
It also leaves him as the smartest man on earth.
But taking another look a decade later, it seems Judge was more precognizant than H.G.
Wells and Jules Verne combined.
to keep watch on any would-be undesirable.
Worse, smoking has been made a federal offense.
), but much of the film involves lots of shooting and yelling.
That the Eyeborgs are killing people is never in question.
on the wrong side of the map.
So there you go.
Unchecked pollution has grown so bad most women have been rendered infertile.
So, um, go back and read the first paragraph again.
