Dystopia
subgenreBroken societies and futures gone wrong.
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.
A Clockwork Orange
In a brutalist near-future Britain, charismatic delinquent Alex DeLarge leads his droogs through nights of 'ultra-violence' — until the state captures him and volunteers him for an experimental treatment that removes his ability to choose evil, and with it, his ability to choose at all.
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.
Logan's Run
In a domed city of endless pleasure centuries after civilization's collapse, every citizen lives in comfort until the age of thirty — at which point they're required to submit to Carousel, a ritual execution disguised as reincarnation. Logan 5, an enforcer tasked with hunting down citizens who try to run rather than submit, is ordered to go undercover as a runner himself — and begins to question everything his society has told him about what actually happens after the crystal in his palm turns black.
Mad Max 2: The Road Warrior
In the fuel-starved wasteland after civilization's collapse, burnt-out ex-cop Max Rockatansky stumbles into a war between a besieged refinery community and a marauder army — and reluctantly becomes the driver of their one chance at escape.
Escape from New York
By 1997, Manhattan Island has been walled off entirely and converted into a maximum-security prison where convicts are dumped and left to build their own lawless society. When Air Force One crashes inside the island with the President of the United States aboard, the authorities offer decorated ex-soldier and convicted bank robber Snake Plissken a full pardon for one impossible job: go in, get the President out, in 24 hours or less.
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.
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.
Akira
Neo-Tokyo, 2019, thirty-one years after a psychic detonation leveled the old city. Teenage biker Kaneda's gang collides with a secret government program when his volatile friend Tetsuo awakens powers that could end the world — powers connected to a name the state buried underground: Akira.
Twelve Monkeys
In 2035, decades after a virus killed five billion people and drove the survivors underground, prisoner James Cole is sent back in time — not to prevent the outbreak, which is impossible, but to trace its source. Battered between decades and diagnosed insane in 1990, Cole begins to wonder if the doctors are right, while a childhood memory of an airport shooting keeps circling closer.
Strange Days
Los Angeles, the last two days of 1999. Lenny Nero, ex-cop turned black-market dealer, sells SQUID recordings — full sensory captures of other people's experiences, straight from their cerebral cortex to yours. Addicted to replaying tapes of his own lost relationship, Lenny is dragged out of his loop when a snuff recording lands in his hands: evidence of a murder that connects to his ex, a music-industry conspiracy, and a police killing that could set the burning city off entirely.
Starship Troopers
In a militarized future where citizenship must be earned through federal service, high school graduate Johnny Rico enlists in the Mobile Infantry alongside his friends, expecting glory. Instead, he finds himself on the front lines of an all-out interstellar war against the Arachnids, a species of massive, ravenous alien insects — while the propaganda broadcasts back home keep insisting humanity is winning.
Dark City
John Murdoch wakes in a hotel bathtub with no memory, a dead woman in the next room, and detectives closing in for murders he can't remember committing. As he runs through a city where it is always midnight, he begins noticing what no one else does: at 12:00 exactly, the entire population falls asleep, the buildings physically rearrange themselves — and pale men in long coats move among the sleepers, injecting new memories into new lives.
The Matrix
By day, Thomas Anderson writes software; by night, as the hacker Neo, he chases a phrase that haunts the net: the Matrix. The answer — that reality is a simulation run by machines farming humanity for power, and that he may be the anomaly foretold to end it — arrives with sunglasses, a red pill, and the best action cinema of the decade.
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.