Dystopia
subgenreBroken societies and futures gone wrong.
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.
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.
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.
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.
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.