Corporate Dystopia
themeMega-corporations with more power than governments.
Metropolis
In a vertical city where the wealthy live in tower gardens and the workers labor unseen in the machine rooms below, industrialist's son Freder falls for Maria, a worker who preaches peace between the classes — and follows her underground into a conspiracy involving a mad inventor, a stolen face, and a robot built to end the dream of unity for good.
Soylent Green
New York City, 2022: forty million people are crammed into a metropolis choking on pollution and starvation, and most of the population survives on rations of a mysterious, government-distributed wafer called Soylent Green. When a wealthy executive of the company that makes it is murdered, hard-bitten detective Frank Thorn's investigation uncovers a conspiracy far worse than the killing itself — a secret buried in exactly what Soylent Green is actually made of.
Alien
The commercial towing vessel Nostromo, hauling ore between stars, is diverted by company order to investigate a signal from a dead world. What the crew brings back aboard has a life cycle perfectly designed to use them — and their employer knew.
Blade Runner
Los Angeles, 2019: perpetual rain, perpetual night, perpetual advertising. Burned-out cop Rick Deckard is forced back to work hunting four escaped replicants — bioengineered humans with four-year lifespans who have come to Earth to meet their maker and demand more life.
GemBrazil
In a retro-futuristic, totalitarian bureaucracy choking on paperwork and ductwork, low-level government clerk Sam Lowry spends his days processing forms and his nights escaping into elaborate flying dreams. When a literal typing error — a squashed fly jamming a printer, turning 'Tuttle' into 'Buttle' — sends the wrong man to his death, Sam's attempt to correct the paperwork pulls him into a nightmarish collision between his fantasies and a state that treats a clerical mistake as more dangerous than the person it actually kills.
Aliens
Ellen Ripley, sole survivor of the Nostromo, is found drifting after 57 years in hypersleep — and nobody believes her story. When contact is lost with a colony on the very world where her crew found the derelict ship, she returns with a unit of cocky Colonial Marines. This time it isn't one alien.
RoboCop
In a near-future Detroit run by mega-corporation OCP, officer Alex Murphy is executed by a gang on his first day in the worst precinct — then resurrected as RoboCop, a corporate-owned cyborg law-enforcement product. But fragments of Murphy remain, and they remember everything.
GemThey Live
A drifter looking for work in Los Angeles finds a box of sunglasses that reveal the truth: the billboards say OBEY, the money says THIS IS YOUR GOD, and the ruling class are skull-faced aliens running Earth as a third-world franchise. He responds the only way an American hero can — with a shotgun and a one-liner.
Total Recall
Construction worker Doug Quaid can't stop dreaming of Mars, so he buys the memory of a trip from Rekall Inc. — and the implant chair wakes something already buried in his head. Soon he's killing trained agents by reflex, and the only certainty is a message from his own face: get your ass to Mars.
Johnny Mnemonic
2021: half the world suffers from a technology-induced plague, and the most valuable data travels not on networks — too easily hacked — but inside the heads of mnemonic couriers. Johnny is one of them, and his latest job stuffs his implanted memory far beyond safe capacity with data the Yakuza and a pharmaceutical giant will kill for. He has roughly a day to make delivery before the payload literally destroys his brain — the same brain he emptied of his own childhood to make room for cargo.
Blade Runner 2049
Thirty years after the original, K is a new-model replicant working as a blade runner for the LAPD, retiring older rogue models without complaint — until a routine job unearths a buried secret: evidence that a replicant once gave birth. The discovery could break the wall between the born and the built, and it sends K hunting for a child hidden decades ago, for a vanished blade runner named Deckard, and for an answer about himself he wants too badly to trust.