It can always be worse. At least, that’s what moviegoers have long told themselves, and so there is a weird comfort that comes from losing yourself in big-screen dystopias.
Fritz Lang likely jumpstarted the genre in 1927 with Metropolis’ tale of haves and have-nots, but speculative pessimism quickly caught on in cinema. Like the best science-fiction, stories of futuristic hellholes offer artists a clever and safe way to comment on the problems of today. What follows are my picks for 10 wonderfully wretched film dystopias. Distilling such abundance to a list of 10 is admittedly something of a fool’s errand. As such, I have limited myself to films in which the dystopian milieu plays as central a role as the plot.
10. Dredd (2012, dir. Pete Travis)
Rampant crime and authoritarianism are dystopian catnip, and Dredd feasts on our collective fears of both. It’s a mystery to me how this nonstop actioner, ostensibly directed by Pete Travis but reportedly steered in large part by its accomplished screenwriter, Alex Garland, wound up a box-office disappointment. Based on the Judge Dredd comics, the movie stars Karl Urban as Dredd, among the one-man jury-judge-executioners tasked with ensuring justice in the dangerously overcrowded Mega-City One. That Urban even registers much of a presence, and he does, is especially impressive when you consider that Dredd’s helmet obscures all but the actor’s mouth and jaw.
9. Idiocracy (2006, dir. Mike Judge)
Idiocracy posits a future America overrun with stupidity, presumably because dummies breed more than smarties. Writer-director Mike Judge’s cult comedy is often hilarious but also a bit blind to its own issues with racism and sexism. Example: Luke Wilson and Maya Rudolph play modern-day test subjects selected by the military for their average intelligence; tellingly, average male Wilson is a passive Army clerk, while average female Rudolph is a sex worker. The pair are cryogenically frozen, then awaken 500 years later in a nation where people think Gatorade is water, slavishly watch a TV show called Ow! My Balls! and are governed by a former pro wrestler and porn star. Back in 2006, this all seemed far-fetched…
8. Soylent Green (1973, dir. Richard Fleischer)
The year is 2022 (!) and the world has gone to shit. The earth is unsuitable for vegetation, the oceans are polluted and dying, and humanity subsists on a diet of something called soylent (if you know, you know). Charlton Heston is a hard-nosed cop investigating the murder of an executive with the corporation that makes soylent. Director Richard Fleischer and screenwriter Stanley R. Greenberg concoct a scuzzed-out conspiracy involving soylent, female sex workers (called “furniture” in this uber-sexist dystopia) and a past-their-prime cast that includes Chuck Connors, Joseph Cotten and Edward G. Robinson. Soylent Green was the final film for Robinson, who was dying of cancer throughout production. In the movie’s most exquisite scene, Robinson’s Solomon Roth dies via assisted suicide, going out while surrounded by screened images of the Earth of yesteryear––flowers, trees, rivers, etc.––and rousing classical music. “People were always rotten,” pines the old man, “but the world was beautiful.” Mic drop.
7. Children of Men (2006, dir. Alfonso Cuarón)
By 2027, the global population has ground to a halt in the wake of no one being able to produce children. In an authoritarian United Kingdom where immigration is outlawed, Clive Owen plays Theo, a former activist now an embittered mope who skulks around in a rumpled overcoat and indulges “pull my finger” jokes from his old hippie friend Jaspar (a terrific Michael Caine). Theo’s ennui is disrupted when an ex-flame from his activism days (Julianne Moore) enlists his help to protect Kee, a young refugee who is––wait for it––pregnant and being sought by government forces. Loosely based on a P.D. James novel, Children of Men is conceptually spare but a fully realized dystopia. As a work of visceral excitement, it is phenomenal. Director Alfonso Cuarón and cinematographer Emmanuel Lubezki choreograph a handful of spellbinding action sequences, one of which is among the most jaw-dropping oners you will ever see.
6. Mad Max 2: The Road Warrior (1981, dir. George Miller)
For world-building, few directors can touch George Miller, the Australian impresario behind the Mad Max franchise. For edge-of-your-seat action, there is no contest; 2015’s reimagined Mad Max Fury Road is an unequivocal masterpiece of the genre. For dystopian goodness, however, my money is on this second installment in the series. Long before Mel Gibson revealed himself to be a dumpster fire with legs, he was the perfect embodiment of Max, the stoic antihero roaming a post-apocalyptic landscape. Featuring a handful of excellent set pieces that gave lots of stuntmen lots of work, Mad Max 2: The Road Warrior is essentially a western, albeit with cool-looking vehicles in place of horses and costumes that make one suspect Miller’s crew raided all the punk boutiques and sex stores there were in Sydney.
5. Battle Royale (2000, dir. Kinji Fukasaku)
The Hunger Games and its many imitators have this Japanese shocker to thank for their distinctly brutal take on humanity’s future. In the wake of economic collapse and social breakdown, 40 Japanese ninth-graders leave for what they believe is a school field trip, only to be drugged and awakened on a remote island. One of their teachers, portrayed by Takeshi Kitano, dutifully explains to the kiddos, “Today’s lesson is you get to kill each other off … until there’s only one of you left.” The familiar dramas of high school, from crushes to cliques, become literally weaponized. Battle Royale director Kinji Fukasaku captures a remarkable tone that teeters between darkly funny and emotionally gripping––often simultaneously.
4. RoboCop (1987, dir. Paul Verhoeven)
While Detroit has long been caricatured as a crime-infested hellhole, at least Dutch director Paul Verhoeven also made it wickedly fun. Set in 1991, RoboCop drops us into a city overrun with criminal gangs, one of which mows down squeaky-clean cop Murphy (Peter Weller, whom Verhoeven later admitted he cast in large part because of his awesome chin). Thanks to corporate behemoth Omni Consumer Products, the left-for-dead officer is transformed into a nearly indestructible crime-fighting quasi-machine. RoboCop delivers plenty of action while skewering corporate greed via wonderfully broad comic performances from Ronny Cox and Miguel Ferrer as rival Omni executives. Some of the picture’s satirical bite has faded with time, but the narrative still packs a bionic wallop.
3. WALL-E (2008, dir. Andrew Stanton)
Though set in the 29th century, WALL-E’s dystopian outlook feels perilously close to where we’re headed. An uninhabitable Earth long ago forced the evacuation of humanity aboard spaceships provided by a huge corporation. Humans, now morbidly obese, are confined to all-purpose chairs and other technological gizmos that can meet their every need. Back on the abandoned planet, a lone working robot, WALL-E (Waste Allocation Loaf-Lifter Earth-Class), dutifully organizes seemingly endless tons of garbage left behind. And yet … amid this gloomy scenario, writer-director Andrew Stanton and co-writer Jim Reardon offer a poignant tale of love and hope when WALL-E meets another robot, the sleekly designed Eve. An Oscar winner for Best Animated Feature, WALL-E is a visual and tonal masterpiece, arguably the finest feature in Pixar’s impressive canon.
2. Minority Report (2002, dir. Steven Spielberg)
It’s Washington, D.C., in the year 2054, and three psychic beings called precogs marinate in a pool of water and occasionally predict future murders. Tom Cruise portrays John Anderton, the head of the precrime law enforcement agency that takes its cues from the precogs. When Anderton winds up on the losing end of a precog prediction, he goes on the run to clear his name for something he has not yet done. Screenwriters Scott Frank and Jon Cohen spent two years adapting the Philip K. Dick novella on which Minority Report is based. That painstaking care shows. Under the steady direction of Steven Spielberg, the film is intricately plotted but cleanly told, propulsive and exciting, a sharp rebuke to the trade-off between freedom and security. For me, Minority Report is Spielberg’s best film of the 2000s.
1. A Clockwork Orange (1971, dir. Stanley Kubrick)
This elegantly chilling adaptation of Anthony Burgess’ 1962 novel had a profound impact on me when I first saw it as a teenager, on a rented Blockbuster VHS. It was my entry point to Stanley Kubrick. Set in a slightly futuristic London, A Clockwork Orange stars a frightening and charismatic Malcolm McDowell as Alex, leader of three hooligans clad in white suspenders, black bowlers and heavy-duty codpieces. The brutality of the opening sequences, in which Alex and his fellow “droogs” embark on a sadistic night of the “ultra violent,” has not dimmed with time. In a horrifying home invasion, Alex rapes a woman while crooning “Singin’ in the Rain,” with the victim’s husband forced to watch helplessly. The film initially earned an X rating before Kubrick cut 30 seconds to attain an R. Shortly after its release, a Dutch woman was sexually assaulted by attackers who sang “Singin’ in the Rain” throughout the ordeal. Kubrick withdrew the film from circulation in Great Britain, where it would not be seen for decades. Even for Kubrick, whose movies routinely divided critics, A Clockwork Orange proved especially polarizing. But he had much more on his mind than shock. The film challenges our idea of free will and its relation to good and evil, a theme he emphasizes with generous dollops of dark satire. Responding to a withering column in The New York Times, Kubrick wrote that A Clockwork Orange “warns against the new psychedelic fascism––the eye-popping, multimedia, quadrasonic, drug-oriented conditioning of human beings by other human beings––which many believe will usher in the forfeiture of human citizenship and the beginning of zombiedom.”
Honorable mention: Akira (1988, dir: Katsuhiro Otomo), Blade Runner (1982, dir: Ridley Scott), Brazil (1985, dir: Terry Gilliam), District 9 (2009, dir: Neil Blomkamp), Escape from New York (1981, dir: John Carpenter), The Long Walk (2025, dir: Francis Lawrence), Metropolis (1927, dir: Fritz Lang), Rollerball (1975, dir: Norman Jewison), Stalker (1979, dir: Andrei Tarkovsky), Total Recall (1990, dir: Paul Verhoeven)
Cutting to the Chase with Phil Bacharach 