Dystopian Sci-Fi

Children of Men to Blade Runner to V for Vendetta. The sub-genre that uses near-future settings to argue about the present.

Dystopian science fiction is the genre that takes a contemporary anxiety — environmental collapse, authoritarian government, technological dependency, social fragmentation — and projects it into a near future where the anxiety has become the social structure. The genre's best entries use the future as a thinking-tool about the present.

The picks

  • Blade Runner (1982) — Ridley Scott. Los Angeles, 2019. The visual template for almost every subsequent cyberpunk dystopia.
  • Children of Men (2006) — Alfonso Cuarón. London, 2027. Infertility as metaphor for civilizational collapse.
  • Brazil (1985) — Terry Gilliam. The most-Kafkaesque dystopian comedy ever made.
  • V for Vendetta (2005) — James McTeigue. Adapted from the Alan Moore graphic novel.
  • Mad Max: Fury Road (2015) — George Miller. Post-apocalyptic action whose dystopian world is delivered through movement rather than exposition.
  • Snowpiercer (2013) — Bong Joon-ho. Class warfare on a train circling a frozen Earth.
  • The Road (2009) — John Hillcoat. Cormac McCarthy adaptation.
  • Gattaca (1997) — Andrew Niccol. Genetic-determinism dystopia.
  • 1984 (1984) — Michael Radford. Orwell adaptation, John Hurt and Richard Burton.
  • The Matrix (1999) — The Wachowskis. The most-influential late-90s sci-fi dystopia.

What the genre keeps doing

Almost every successful dystopian film uses one specific anxiety as its central conceit. Children of Men: infertility (and, by extension, civilisational continuity). Blade Runner: corporate capitalism and synthetic consciousness. Brazil: bureaucracy. Snowpiercer: climate engineering combined with class. 1984: surveillance and language. Gattaca: genetic determinism.

The films that don't work in the genre tend to be the ones that try to summarise multiple anxieties without committing to one. The single-conceit dystopia is the structurally cleaner choice.

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