Colossus: The Forbin Project (1970) Review
I have watched this more times than is defensible. A film about a computer, a requirements document and a mountain, and the machine is never once broken.
Tag: Dystopia
Dystopias are warnings wearing story costumes, and the good ones age into prophecy. This tag collects reviews of dystopian film and fiction: engineered societies, quiet horrors, and the presents each dark future was written about.
DystopiaGeorge Orwell Day: The Rules About Sentences
Orwell spent his life dismantling the class and empire he was raised inside, took a pen name so his family would not be embarrassed by his poverty, and died at forty-six. His most useful legacy to writers is not the…
AprilHate Week
Hate Week comes from Orwell's 1984. Why the novel stays relevant decade after decade, and what writers can learn from fiction that became a permanent warning.
2000sDaybreakers (2009)
The Spierig brothers imagined a near future where vampirism has won. It is a genuinely smart science-fiction idea, and for its first hour the film is a sharp dystopian satire.
DystopiaUnderworld Series (2003-2016)
The Underworld films turned the vampire into a leather-clad action hero across five entries. As a whole it is more than the sum of its uneven parts.
2020sSinners (2025)
Ryan Coogler's Jim Crow-era vampire film uses the genre to explore Black art and cultural memory. It establishes the stakes of everything that follows.
Book ReviewsA Clockwork Orange
The delinquent Alex undergoes a state-enforced cure that raises the book's central question: is goodness without choice goodness at all? A ferocious dystopia, brilliant and disturbing, written in unforgettable invented slang. A short novel that has lost none of its…
Book ReviewsBrave New World
A society controlled not by pain but by pleasure, engineered contentment, consumption, distraction, and a drug called soma. Often read as the mirror image of 1984, its warning about a population that loves its own servitude feels, to many, even…
Book Reviews1984
The novel that gave us Big Brother, doublethink, thoughtcrime, and the memory hole, a towering dystopia of totalitarianism, surveillance, and the war on truth itself. A masterpiece of political imagination whose warnings have only grown more relevant, and one of…
Book ReviewsNineteen Eighty-four
Big Brother. Doublethink. Thoughtcrime. The memory hole. Orwell gave us the vocabulary for tyranny, and the words have outlived most of the books written since. A lesson in carrying a political argument through one man's experience without ever lecturing, grim…
2000sIdiocracy (2006)
Mike Judge's 2006 dystopian satire. Average man wakes in 500-years-dumber future.
1920sMetropolis (1927)
Fritz Lang's 1927 German silent SF epic. The film every dystopian city movie has copied.