Of all modern Sci-Fi Dystopia depicted in movies, which do you think our world will most resemble or already does resemble?
Personally, as is often noted, "Idiocracy" is probably tops for current events... but for the farther future, I'd go Blade Runner Universe, most likely.... just for the sheer scale of total biosphere degradation and megacorp control. How about you?
Back to the Future 2's bad timeline.
wow. Surprisingly awesome answer. Biff's Casino IS America right now
Idiocracy 💯
It is the most unrealistic, dispite [gestures broadly to everything] because.
That is the most unrealistic part of the film.
Remember that's it's 500 years later. There will be plenty of time for things to get desperate enough that the masses will cry out for a savior, and the savior will look down and whisper, "no...
more brawndo on the plants."
Go away, 'batin'.
there are lots of tards living kick ass lives!
Exactly, is there any debate about this?
I mean aside from the president being much cooler and having a sort of good ending, of course.
It seems like we're shifting into Minority Report. There are actual pre crime divisions in police departments now and the surveillance state continues to grow exponentially.
…and it was wrong.
People still act like the pre crime stuff isn't real. most people never really think outside of what was marketed to them. And once you do you realize everything has always been bullshit.
Three way tie in my book:
That episode of Black Mirror where everyone had to ride stationary bikes and were forced to watch unskippable ads if they didn't have credits, except everything you have to watch is AI slop instead of your crush doing porn.
Or the Handmaid's Tale, but instead of some mysterious infertility crisis, fertile women are rare because they die in pregnancy and childbirth due to anti-science rhetoric flat out killing them. (Look up "free birthing", etc.) At some point it gets bad enough that replacing your wife is more like getting a new pet.
Maybe the hot version of The Road. We just have wars over water and resources until the plantet's too fucked for human life, and the survivors are left roaming around making jerky out of each other until the end.
Could be all three at once. Yay!
We're not there yet, but I could see a bit more fear-mongering smashing us into V For Vendetta territory
I think we’re closer to v for vendetta than we realize. We have secret police kidnapping people. We’re literally building concentration camps en masse even though we have the highest percentage of citizens incarcerated per capita in the world already. We got musk with a company literally putting brain chips in people and doing god knows what with huge government subsidies and he shut down ethics investigations into what he was doing so… yeah
Lots of great answers here but the first that came to my mind is Gattaca.
I wish we had Gattaca instead of what we have. At least the shitty people would be genetically superior, for whatever that's worth, instead of just richer.
THX 1138. The police robots force us to build them and beat us if we don't. We have no idea who controls them.
I’ve not watched this yet, but that is terrifying.
Children of Men
1984
With a little bit of Brave New World and Farenheit 451 sprinkled in
“A really efficient totalitarian state would be one in which the all-powerful executive of political bosses and their army of managers control a population of slaves who do not have to be coerced, because they love their servitude.”
That rat snitch thief Orwell has nothing on Aldous Huxley.
Total surveillance plus child indoctrination plus no voter interest equals total gov control
Add cyberpunk 2077 to that mix
Elysium - rich people living in space or enclaves; the rest of us in slums with robots and AIs controlling us.
I've never been able to quite let go of that movie. It's very on-the-nose but still hits home. So many of us are what we see as the bad guys in the movie; just move it all down to earth and there we are.
This the one, boss.
Present day isn't Idiocracy, in the Idiocracy the president cared about his people and listened to the world's smartest man to fix the crops.
I'm pretty sure the idiot president thing has a shelf life, even. We'll be back to clean-cut fascist dictators soon enough.
Robocop, corporate ownership of major infrastructure, militant authoritarian police force.
Where is our hero robot?
The same place as the heroes in every other piece of fiction... non-existent.
No one's going to ride in on a white horse and slay our dragons for us.
Children of men.
Plastics that have accumulated in our bodies are going to have massive impacts on our bodys regular functions. Covid ran rampant causing mental decline and increased weaknesses to milder diseases, leading to further degradation of our body's regular function. Authoritarianism is deep set into our politics Climate change is forcing more and more people into refugee status. The rich and wealthy continue to violate our planet for their own gain, building themselves bunkers and personal armies to defend themselves from the consequences of their actions.
It's such an impressive film, easily in my Top 10 of all time. The worldbuilding is incredible, everything feels real and grounded in reality.
For me it's more the general feeling of everything going to shit and there's nothing we can do to stop it.
Our legacy
fades and melts away
'cause tomorrow
may not ever beSo we dance and sing
try to bear the thought
of approaching
the end of our time
Okay I'm gonna sound like an optimist, but I think The Expanse timeline, without the blue goo stuff, is a possible future.
I know it still doesn't sound good since um... there are still human rights issues and corruption, but hey, at least humans didn't go extinct. And we get to go to space.
I'm jealous of your optimism.... and in the end of Caliban's war right now! I loved the series. I can only hope...
I would say that we will very soon find ourselves in 1984 or perhaps Brazil, with a little bit of The Circle and Her thrown in, but overall it will be more like The Road due to climate change, unless Elysium technology has been developed by then, which is unlikely, but if so, it will certainly be used as depicted in the film.
It's not a sci-fi dystopia, but I just watched Zootopia again and the plot is harsher in hindsight. The villain is trying to gain power by turning everyone against a minority population and making them fear that minority. To think this came out before Trump's first presidency.
Well, this isn't a unique concept. The fact it goes horrible pretty quickly and people keep falling for it is the truly impressive part.
Also the cops can do whatever they want with impunity.
By the end, judy is BFs with the biggest mob boss in town, who she knows kills people.
That bugged me too. I also saw Zootopia 2 today. SPOILER ALERT Nick leads a prison break with seemingly no consequences in the end
Cyberpunk 2077 but without any of the cool tech shit.
I'm going with "They Live".
Feels like Judge Dredd
Maybe recency bias, but a lot of stuff from the new Running Man hits home. Maybe not the murder TV show but (obviously minor worldbuilding spoilers):
Bifurcated society, where the have nots have to check in to enter the nice part of town. (Related story: A couple years ago, I visited America for a wedding. After the pre-wedding reception, I was walking back to my hotel through an upscale neighbourhood, in a suit. Within a half hour private security drove by, got out of the car, hand on gun and explained they'd received calls about me walking on the sidewalk. The guy then insisted he drive me to a more suitable area.)
Unions existed but reporting to them gets you blacklisted, people need work so safety regulations only exist on paper.
Veterans Affairs is taken over by the Y and reduced to a miserable hostel and not much else.
Time in a green park is awarded by lottery and only briefly.
Ubiquitous private security.
One media network, that is free and mostly exists to pit haves vs have nots. (Pretty much social media already)
Etc. I think the part that really gets me is you don't have to imagine particularly hard to see us getting there.
The Running Man novel is set in 2025 and the second movie adaptation just came out. Things aren't as bad as they are portrayed there. Reality shows aren't killing people yet. But people are going on exploitative reality shows because they feel desperate for money.
Not too far away yet.
There is a squid games reality show which is based on a game where they kill people, and they pretend to kill them in the show so it's being normalized.
And Mr beast has his gameshow which is similar, where they treat the contestants inhumanly just for the convenience of the production.
Elysium seems a good candidate.
Wall-E
Except only the rich get to leave, the rest of end up as trash cubes
I agree, but only about the star of Earth in that series. The Epstein drive, protomolecule, even the colonization of Mars are all not guaranteed futures in my view. But if we keep going to way we are, yeah, I can see a 50+% unemployment rate and lots of brutalist architecture.
Cyberpunk but without the cool stuff like cyber ware or flying cars.
Flying cars were always dangerous and impractical in the places where they'd be needed, but I'm already in line for an implant that didn't used to exist. Cyberware is basically just that on an elective basis, right?
We have crypto, talking computers and warfare looks like this:
Next up I'm waiting on crowded street markets lit by signage, although the trend towards delivering everything makes me doubt.
The one trope that can't happen is corporations as government. Executives are not warlords, even if they think they are. Actual authoritarian regimes always end up looking like each other, and not like Google.
Not a movie yet (AFAIK), but Octavia Butler’s novel Parable of the Sower is downright uncanny.
Idiocracy.
The movie was written as a joke, but unfortunately society decided to use it as a road map.
Shadowrun.
OK, maybe without all the supernatural elements.
I don't know, I'm not sure anyone has made a movie about a boring-ass dystopia where the rich plunder everything and the rest of us are too propagandized to care no matter how desperate things get. I'm going for a special mix of Harrison Bergeron, The Day After Tomorrow and The Road ultimately. Oh and Snowcrash , but until we get there I'm sure "The Frog Boil" will be a hit when it does come out.
Quality land by Marc Uwe Kling. The world is basically ruled by hyper capitalistic cooperations, people are rated by their productivity people don’t buy stuff actively, it’s bought for them by their personal AI when the algorithm thinks they need it.
The plot partly follows the presidential election between an AI powered Robot that tries to act in the interest of humanity versus a populist right wing TV cook that’s a shockingly close prediction of Trump. The other part is about the main character on his mission to refund an item he didn’t actually want.
To this day my favourite dystopian book.
Right now: Deus Ex, specifically the Adam Jensen games
in the Near future, best case we get Cyberpunk 2077, worst case we get Horizon Zero dawn’s Faro Plague
Damn, forgot about that game for a while. I would've killed for Adam Jensen's sunglasses.
“A really efficient totalitarian state would be one in which the all-powerful executive of political bosses and their army of managers control a population of slaves who do not have to be coerced, because they love their servitude.”
Visionary Aldous Huxley
I've always thought it would be like Tank Girl but the big company is basically a merger of Amazon and Nestle.
Her
Brave New World needs an honourable mention for only looking more plausible a century later. We do like our horny birth control sex and not thinking too hard about sad things.
I hope for cyberpunk, because Star Trek (post-WWIII) isn't gonna happen. Dune or a boring version of Terminator are also in the running, possibly at the same time.
Edit: A cyberpunk phase might give way to a far future that's not exactly Star Trek, but that is similarly equal, tolerant and pleasant. I know that wasn't the question, but that's why it's the direction I'm pushing for.
If it's Dune, the last couple centuries were a blip, and the kind of violent autocratic hell that existed before that is just what human civilisation naturally looks like, so it will keep going. If it's Terminator, hopefully the AI does something nice without us, at least.
The Lathe of Heaven.
Someones having some really bad dreams and fucking with the timeline.
Brazil
irobot
Warhammer 40k /s
Brave New World.
Gonna have to disagree there.
Brave New World was a managed dystopian utopia. We're in an unmanaged mess. The only thing we have in common is the distractions.
There's that episode of The Orville where social media is the law.
Wondla
Parable of the Sower.
Murderbot if we as a species ever make it that far
Ratchet & Clank
I think the Wired of Serial Experiments Lain is pretty accurate.
Companies like Meta are actively trying to create an immersive digital world (the "metaverse") like the Wired.
And the Wired is symbolic of the issues with the modern internet, from the escapism and addiction to rumors to false information shaping peoples views to companies controlling the world throigh algorithms and censorship.
The multiple Lains are symbolic of how everyone can a different view of you and your opinions, often shaped by lies, and the Wired Lain which is the one of these actually controlled by her is symbolic of how we act differently online than in real life.
Masami Eiri is symbolic of companies and powerful individuals controlling online narratives and owning most of the internet you interact with.
The Phantoma game is symbolic of how the things that happen and the things that are said online have real world consequences.
It is an absolutely brilliant show which I highly recommend watching if you like visual metaphors.
Not exactly sci fi, but the TV adaptation of Handmaid’s Tale bears some striking parallels to the current renaissance that extreme right ideologies are currently enjoying. Off the top of my head…
You can see examples of all three of these in what’s happening now.
I agree with you
I really don’t want to be living in a Margaret Atwood book.