Dredd (2012)
Dredd is the rare comic book adaptation that fully understood its source material. Alex Garland wrote, between his collaborations.
Genre: Dystopian
Futures that went wrong on purpose. Dystopian fiction builds a system designed to control people, then follows the ones who bend under it or refuse to, and the best of it is always about the present in disguise.
ActionDemolition Man (1993)
Demolition Man is one of the funniest action films of the early 1990s and one of the most accidentally prescient. Marco Brambilla directed in his feature.
ActionEscape from New York (1981)
Escape from New York is John Carpenter's dystopian action film and one of the foundational works of 1980s post-apocalyptic cinema. Carpenter directed and co-wrote with Nick Castle.
DystopianSnowpiercer (2013)
Bong directed and co-wrote with Kelly Masterson. The film made approximately eighty-six million dollars worldwide on a forty million dollar budget.
ActionGhost in the Shell (2017)
Ghost in the Shell is the live-action adaptation of Masamune Shirow's manga and the subsequent animated films and television series. Jamie Moss, William Wheeler, and Ehren Kruger wrote.
ActionRoboCop (1987, 1990, 1993, 2014)
RoboCop is the satirical action franchise that established the cybernetic-cop subgenre and one of the most accomplished critiques of late-1980s corporate. Paul Verhoeven directed the 1987 original.
ActionRoboCop (1987) Review
RoboCop is a better film than its premise suggests and a more subversive one than its marketing implied. Paul Verhoeven made a corporate satire inside a violent action film, and the two registers enhance each other instead of competing.
ActionLogan’s Run (1976) Review
The film that executes the concept earns a 6, primarily because of an ending that retreats from the horror it spent ninety minutes building. The domed city is a closed system, finite resources, finite population, managed by a computer that…
DetectiveMinority Report (2002) Review
Minority Report is a Spielberg film arguing against surveillance and predictive control while being too Spielberg to commit fully to the darkness its premise requires. Dick's source material was about the arbitrary nature of certainty, and Spielberg captures that element…
DystopianDark City (1998) Review
Dark City is the most underrated film in the history of science fiction cinema. It arrived in 1998, one year before The Matrix, explored several of the same fundamental questions about manufactured reality and the nature of consciousness, and was…
DramaGattaca (1997) Review
Andrew Niccol designed Gattaca's world with genuine intelligence. The discrimination is depicted without melodrama, which is the film's most mature choice.
DetectiveBlade Runner 2049 (2017) Review
Blade Runner 2049 is visually extraordinary and narratively inert. Denis Villeneuve and Roger Deakins built some of the most stunning images in recent science fiction cinema, the orange desolation of post-collapse Las Vegas, the grey protein farms extending to the…