Greedy corporations, scarily convincing artificial intelligence, a devastating pandemic, a surveillance culture that’s straight out of George Orwell and the impending threat of catastrophic climate change — it’s safe to say that the imagined worlds of dystopian movies now feel scarily close to home. In fact, it’s striking to see how unnervingly prescient many of these stories have turned out to be.
The word dystopia was created as an opposite concept to utopia, a perfect society, and translates directly from Ancient Greek as “not-good place”, which is a pretty appropriate catch-all description for the majority of the societies shown in these films, where technology has often gone too far, superseding human morality, or where authoritarian regimes have cracked down on the public, leaving them with no freedom. It’s often the similarities with our own world that are most frightening, rather than the differences.
Still, it’s not all doom and gloom (OK, it’s probably at least 95 per cent doom) as these stories often offer us a glimmer of hope in the form of a protagonist that’s unafraid to challenge the status quo, overcoming the odds to upturn oppressive systems. Perhaps that’s why, even as science fact seems in danger of catching up with science fiction, these films remain enduringly popular. From cult classics like Blade Runner and A Clockwork Orange to more recent hits like Mad Max: Fury Road, these are some of the best.
1. Blade Runner (1982)
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Based on the enigmatically titled Philip K. Dick novel Do Androids Dream of Electric Sheep?, Ridley Scott’s film set the standard for all dystopian movies to come. Set in a neon-drenched Los Angeles beset by pollution and over-population, Harrison Ford stars as LAPD officer Rick Deckard, who’s keen to retire from his role as a blade runner who tracks down replicants. These humanoid robots were developed by mega-corporations to work in space colonies, but have been banned from Earth after a rebellion.
When Deckard’s boss tells him that a handful of replicants have managed to escape and are living illegally as humans, he is drawn back for one last job, one which will force him to question his ideas about what makes us human. Scott’s vision and storytelling is so ambitious, it’s hard to believe that audiences and critics weren’t immediately dazzled by Blade Runner, which received a somewhat lukewarm reception on its debut in 1982 (Scott himself famously wasn’t happy with the theatrical version released by the studios, and released his director’s cut 10 years later) but the movie went on to become a cult classic and has inspired countless filmmakers.
Watch Blade Runner on Amazon Prime Video
2. Children of Men (2006)
Humanity is on the verge of extinction in Alfonso Cuarón’s striking adaptation of P.D. James’ novel, which takes place in the year 2027 (yikes). For reasons that no one has been able to work out, a worldwide infertility crisis has ensured that no children have been born for 18 years, while decades of war and economic depression has prompted swathes of refugees to flee to the United Kingdom, one of the last remaining stable societies. The UK government’s response? To form a police state, where refugees are imprisoned and even executed by the army.
Clive Owen plays Theo, an activist who meets Kee (Clare-Hope Ashitey), a young refugee woman who also happens to be pregnant, and attempts to transport her to a group of scientists working on the global infertility crisis. With Cuarón’s atmospheric direction — including some staggering one-shot sequences — and the eerie prescience of some of its subject matter, Children of Men remains as relevant as it did upon its release more than 15 years ago, if not more so.
Watch Children of Men on Amazon Prime Video
3. A Clockwork Orange (1971)
Set in a near-future Britain where gangs of youngsters roam the streets, social division is rife and the government is riddled with corruption, Stanley Kubrick’s adaptation of Anthony Burgess’s novel remains one of the most controversial films of all time: after claims that it had inspired copycat violence, Kubrick asked for it to be withdrawn from release in the UK in 1973, with the filmmaker effectively banning his own film in his home country until his death in 1999.
A Clockwork Orange has lost none of its power to shock today. It follows Alex (Malcolm McDowell), a gang ringleader whose acts of ‘ultra-violence’ terrorise London. When he is eventually arrested and imprisoned for his crimes, he becomes a test subject for the Ludovico Technique, a form of aversion therapy that promises to rehabilitate even the most hardened criminals in just two weeks. But can someone like Alex ever really change, and do the powers that be even want him to do so?
Watch A Clockwork Orange on Amazon Prime Video
4. A.I. Artificial Intelligence (2001)
Twenty years on from its release, there are many aspects of the post-apocalyptic world of A.I. Artificial Intelligence that are no longer the stuff of science fiction. Global warming has wiped out the world’s coastal cities, leading to a population decrease, with the shortfall met by the rise of humanoid robots, who have complex functions but cannot yet recreate human emotions. Until, that is, a child robot capable of love is developed. David (Haley Joel Osment), a prototype, is given to a family whose son is suffering from a rare disease.
Kubrick started work on an adaptation of Super-Toys Last All Summer Long, the short story by British sci-fi writer Brian Aldiss which would eventually become A.I. Artificial Intelligence, back in the ‘70s, hiring Steven Spielberg as the director and asking Aldiss to write. The project languished in development hell for years, however, partly because the CGI available simply didn’t match up to Kubrick’s vision. Filming didn’t start until 2000, but the end product is thought to be pretty close to Kubrick’s plans.
Watch A.I. Artificial Intelligence on Amazon Prime Video
5. Never Let Me Go (2010)
Keira Knightley, Carey Mulligan and Andrew Garfield, an impressive trio of then-rising stars, lead this haunting, thoughtful adaptation of Kazuo Ishiguro’s novel, which is scripted by Alex Garland, who’d go on to make cerebral sci-fi films like Ex Machina and Annihilation (a friend of Ishiguro’s, Garland asked him for the screen rights to the book before he’d even finished reading it).
As children, Kathy (Mulligan), Tommy (Garfield) and Ruth (Knightley) befriend one another as pupils at the mysterious Hailsham boarding school, but everything changes when a teacher reveals their true purpose: the pupils are all clones, who have been created to donate organs; after they have fulfilled this, they will die at a young age. There are whispers, however, that donors who can prove they are in love might be able to “defer” their inevitable fate, a rumour that shapes the love triangle that forms between the protagonists. With its murky ethical questions, Ishiguro’s story still fascinates — and a TV version is currently in the works at US channel FX.
Watch Never Let Me Go on Amazon Prime Video
6. V for Vendetta (2006)
Set in the not-so distant future, V for Vendetta imagines a Britain ruled over by the authoritarian Norsefire party, a political organisation with neo-fascist, white supremacist beliefs who force a fundamental Christian orthodoxy on the population, imprisoning or killing off anyone they deem to be undesirable. In this screen adaptation of David Lloyd and Alan Moore’s comic book, written by the Wachowskis, Natalie Portman plays Evey Hammond, who is rescued from the secret police by a mysterious vigilante wearing a Guy Fawkes mask, who goes by the name V.
She soon becomes caught up in his attempts to kickstart a revolution and bring down the fascist regime. Just like Children of Men, which was released in the same year, V for Vendetta feels strangely prescient; its Guy Fawkes masks have since been adopted by protestors, most famously by the Occupy movement and the Anonymous hactivists.
Watch V for Vendetta on Amazon Prime Video
7. The Hunger Games (2012)
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The film adaptation of Suzanne Collins’s wildly successful — and much-imitated — young adult series sent Jennifer Lawrence’s career into the stratosphere. She plays Katniss Everdeen, a spirited rebel who’s handy with a bow and arrow and resides in District 12, one of the dozen districts which make up Panem, a post-apocalyptic America ruled by an over-class from the wealthy Capitol.
As a punishment for past uprisings, each district must send a tribute to the annual Hunger Games, a fight to the death, and when Katniss’s younger sister Prim is selected to take part, she quickly steps up to take her place. The next three movies were arguably a case of diminishing returns (especially the decision to opportunistically carve Collins’s final book, Mockingjay, into two films) but this first instalment, propelled by Lawrence’s performance, is gripping, with a real sense of darkness that’s often absent from YA fare, and the supporting cast — from Woody Harrelson and Donald Sutherland to Elizabeth Banks and Stanley Tucci — is top tier.
Watch The Hunger Games on Netflix
8. The Matrix (1999)
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What happens when machines become intelligent enough to overtake the humans who made them? Released with very little fanfare on the verge of the new millennium, The Matrix reset the template for the modern sci-fi blockbuster. More than two decades on from its debut, it still feels like one of the genre’s most innovative — and most imitated — films (and yet this was only directing duo Lana and Lilly Wachowski’s second film). Taking place in a dystopian future where humanity has been trapped inside a simulation by the machines that feed off their energy, Keanu Reeves stars as Neo, a computer programmer by day and hacker by night. He is recruited by Morpheus (Laurence Fisburne), the leader of a group of rebels who have worked out that the Matrix they are living in is actually a digital prison, one that bears no resemblance to grim, apocalyptic reality, and who think Neo might be the one to lead the battle against the machines.
Watch The Matrix on Amazon Prime Video
9. Mad Max: Fury Road (2015)
The fourth Mad Max instalment (the earlier films, of course, starred Mel Gibson as the title character) was decades in the making, but it was certainly worth the wait. Fury Road, with its 10 Academy Award nominations and six wins, is one of the most impressive blockbusters of recent years, thanks to its visceral lead performances and its thrilling action sequences, which used real life stunts in favour of computer-generated action.
Set in a dystopian desert world where scarce supplies of water and gas are viciously fought over, Max (played by Tom Hardy) joins Imperator Furiosa (Charlize Theron) as she flees from the clutches of warlord Immortan Joe along with his five wives, striking out for a new homeland. Up next is prequel movie Furiosa, starring Anya Taylor-Joy as a younger version of Theron’s character, which is slated for release in 2024.
Watch Mad Max: Fury Road on Amazon Prime Video
10. Snowpiercer (2013)
South Korean director Bong Joon-ho keeps turning his astute gaze to matters of class: before his huge awards success with Parasite in 2020, he explored similar themes in Snowpiercer, a sci-fi thriller based on a French graphic novel. It’s set in the near future (in the year 2031, to be exact) after a hi-tech attempt to assuage the impact of global warming backfires catastrophically, and ends up kicking off a new ice age. Very few humans survive it, and those that do have gathered in a train, the Snowpiercer, which travels round and round the globe.
The train itself is stratified according to class status, with the super-rich living it up in spacious luxury carriages towards the front and the poorer passengers crammed into the back compartments in squalor, watched over by armed guards — until revolutionary Curtis Everett (Chris Evans) leads his fellow passengers in an uprising. The film has since inspired a Netflix drama, now in its third season.
Watch Snowpiercer on Amazon Prime Video
11. Minority Report (2002)
Another Philip K. Dick adaptation, this time loosely based on his 1956 short story The Minority Report, Spielberg’s film (the second in a run of dystopian sci-fi stories for the director, arriving shortly after A. I. Artificial Intelligence) ponders weighty questions about predetermination, free will and the perils of a surveillance society.
It is set in the year 2054, when, in an attempt to drastically cut crime rates, Washington D.C. police have recently been given the power to arrest criminals for crimes they have not yet committed, as part of a controversial ‘Precrime’ programme which uses the predictions of three clairvoyants, known as ‘Precogs”, to prevent murders before they happen. When Anderton, the boss of the Precrime division played by Tom Cruise, is identified as their next suspect, set to kill a man he has never met, he attempts to work out what could possibly motivate such an act — and sparks a major manhunt in the process. The discovery that the Precogs’ predictions are not infallible, however, throws the whole programme’s credibility into question.
Watch Minority Report on Amazon Prime Video
12. The Maze Runner (2014)
Blame the runaway success of Katniss Everdeen and co if you will, but in the middle of the 2010s, you could barely move for films about a plucky teen hero and their equally heroic and/or tragic pals attempting to stand up to an authoritarian power or navigate a series of challenges to help improve their lot in a depressing post-apocalyptic world (delete as appropriate).
Part of that post-Hunger Games boom in screen adaptations of dystopian-leaning young adult novels (see also: the Divergent series), The Maze Runner is based on the book by James Dashner. It stars Dylan O’Brien as Thomas, who wakes up to find himself in a glade at the centre of an intricate maze, where other teens (played by Brit stars Thomas Brodie-Sangster, Kaya Scodelario and Will Poulter) have formed a rudimentary social order. He’s soon designated as a Runner, tasked with attempting to find a way out of the labyrinth.
Watch The Maze Runner on Amazon Prime Video
13. The Lobster (2015)
This pitch black comedy from arthouse director Yorgos Lanthimos (who went on to helm Oscar hit The Favourite) plays out like Love Island, dystopia style (even the deadpan, stilted speech is just an amped-up version of some of the most awkward ‘chats’ from the ITV dating show). In this dark near-future, single people are given just 45 days to find a partner — after that point, they will be turned into animals.
Newly dumped and morose, David (Colin Farrell) is taken to a hotel where all the guests are single too, and is expected to couple up with one of them after undergoing a series of bizarre rituals (sound familiar?) Out in the woods behind the premises, though, is a group of loners who have broken away from society and forbidden any kind of romance. The Lobster is strange and stark but entirely original, with an impressive cast that also includes Olivia Colman, Ben Whishaw, Rachel Weisz and John C. Reilly.
Watch The Lobster on Amazon Prime Video
14. Blade Runner 2049 (2017)
When the time came for Ridley Scott to pass on the baton of the Blade Runner franchise, there was arguably no director better suited for the challenge than Denis Villeneuve, a filmmaker with a track record of ambitious, emotionally driven sci-fi that’s visually stunning (see 2016’s Arrival for proof).
With its neon-soaked cityscapes and hazy desert scenes set in an abandoned Las Vegas, Blade Runner 2049 certainly doesn’t disappoint on that latter score. Set 30 years after the events of the first film, it stars Ryan Gosling as K who, like Deckard in the original, is a blade runner for the LAPD, tasked with hunting replicants who have gone rogue.
One such chase leads him to make a momentous discovery that will have major implications for the relations between humans and replicants, and sparks a quest to track down Ford’s character, who has been missing for the past three decades. As you’d expect from the sequel to one of the biggest movies of all time, the cast boasts major star power, featuring Robin Wright, Jared Leto and Ana de Armas in a breakout role. Just make sure you’re braced for all 2 hours and 43 minutes of the super-sized runtime.
Watch Blade Runner 2049 on Amazon Prime Video
15. WALL-E (2008)
Family-friendly animation and dystopian sci-fi aren’t exactly two genres that usually go hand in hand, but Pixar’s 2008 offering proves the animation studio’s knack for wrapping up big, thought-provoking questions in deceptively simple stories. It’s the 29th century, and Earth has become a giant rubbish dump thanks to the greed and over-consumption of humans, who decamped from the planet to live on spaceships centuries before. Their muscles have atrophied and their bodies have expanded after spending so long in zero-gravity environments — and after delegating almost every task to their robotic helpers.
Back on Earth, WALL-E is the only one of the trash-compacting robots left behind as part of a cursory clean-up operation that is still functioning. The wide-eyed robot lives a lonely existence, until EVE, who has been sent to scan Earth for any signs of viable life, arrives. It’s still cited among Pixar’s best and most visually impressive work (the filmmakers sought advice from respected cinematographers like Roger Deakins when trying to figure out WALL-E’s lighting and atmosphere), and unsurprisingly picked up the 2009 Oscar for Best Animated Feature.
Watch WALL-E on Amazon Prime Video
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