Fortress (1992)
Gordon's 1992 SF prison action film. B-movie premise, A-movie commitment from Gordon.
Tag: Dystopia (Page 2)
2010sDredd (2012)
Dredd is the rare comic book adaptation that fully understood its source material. Alex Garland wrote, between his collaborations.
1990sStarship Troopers (1997)
Starship Troopers is one of the most misunderstood films of the 1990s and one of the most accomplished political satires in mainstream science fiction. The adaptation is loose in ways that have generated decades of argument.
1990sDemolition 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.
1980sEscape 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.
2010sTotal Recall (2012) Review
Critics judged Wiseman's 2012 Total Recall against the wrong reference film. The 1990 and 2012 versions of Total Recall are different films, not competing films.
1980sRoboCop (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.
1970sLogan’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…
2000sMinority 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…
1990sGattaca (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.
1990sDark 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…
DystopiaBlade 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…