Sci-fi utopian/dystopian movies

[communard resolution]

I've been getting into sci-fi movies lately. While I'm not really into battles between spaceships and the like, I like movies that present a positive, negative, or ambiguous vision of future society.

Can you think of any recommendations regarding utopian/dystopian movies? Please state what you like about your suggestions.

The Blade Runner and ExistenZ are the two most recent ones that I've seen - loved them both.

[Stranger Than Paradise]

Wow, the two you mentioned are two of my all time favourite sci-fi films. To me Sci-Fi is generally a very underated genre. It is to me a very sophisticated and existential genre. I will recommend you some films that relate to future society in some way:

The Face Of Another (http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/The_Face_of_Another_(film))
Stalker (http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Stalker_(film))
Videodrome (http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Videodrome)
A Clockwork Orange (http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/A_Clockwork_Orange_(film))

[Comrade Anarchist]

1984 is an good dystopian movie just a little slow.

[Invincible Summer]

Sounds like you're into cyberpunk - I wouldn't blame you, cuz it's badass.

Here's a site with all things cyberpunk: http://www.cyberpunkreview.com/cyberpunk-movies-by-decade/

I highly recommend Akira (and the mangas), Ghost in the Shell (all the movies and mangas), Gattaca, and Fritz Lang's Metropolis.

You should check out cyberpunk literature too. William Gibson is the most prominent author (in my eyes), as well as Neal Stephenson and Warren Ellis (they both have many books/graphic novels that deal with cyberpunk topics).

William Gibson's "Neuromancer" is supposed to be like... the book that started cyberpunk. You should check it out, as well as the "Burning Chrome" anthology of his short stories.

[Pirate Utopian]

THX1138 is pretty good.

For a more lighthearted but very enterntaining movie check out Death Race 2000 (the original one, not the dull remake).

[x359594]

William Cameron Menzie's Things to Come (1936) from a screenplay by H. G. Wells is worth seeing. The story begins at Christmas 1940 when an unnamed fascist power launches a sneak attack on London. World War II lasts until 1966 by which time Europe has exhausted itself and bands of brigands are left fighting over remaining scarce resources. And that's just the end of Act II.

Truffaut's Fahrenheit 451 is good. Godard's Alphaville is great.

[Yopuii]

Equilibrium was a good one.

[Stranger Than Paradise]

Truffaut's Fahrenheit 451 is good. Godard's Alphaville is great.

Cannot believe I forgot those two. Fahrenheit 451 is a very good film and Alphaville is an outright masterpiece.

[rocker935]

Movies:
Children of Men
V For Vendetta
The Matrix
Minority Report
A Clockwork Orange
Brazil(Haven't seen it, but i've heard good things)

And i know you didn't ask for books, but im gonna give ya a couple

Books:
Fahrenheit 451
The Time Machine
A Clockwork Orange
1984
Brave New World (Haven't read, but i've heard good things)

[bcbm]

the road warrior

[fatpanda]

I would be interested in seeing Tarkovsky's Stalker, but most bourgeious sources claim that it is "a subversive smash against Communism blablabla..."

is this really true?

[penname]

I would be interested in seeing Tarkovsky's Stalker, but most bourgeious sources claim that it is "a subversive smash against Communism blablabla..."

is this really true?

No...it's an "art" film more than anything else and if one tries hard enough he could come up with some bullshit meaning to it. Watch it if you want, but don't be surprised if you haven't understood much of it.

[Uncle Hank]

Solyaris, Metropolis, Planet of the Apes, ect. as well as some others already mentioned. (i.e. Brazil, Children of Men and A Clockwork Orange)

[Jimmie Higgins]

I'm interested in Utopia vs. Distopia. It's funny that from the Victorian era on to WWII sci-fi was more often Utopian whereas now it's almost all Distopian (except for the Star Trek shows). Some of my favorite sci-fi fiction is distopian, but I would love a return to the Utopian fiction of the past. It's like distopia reinforces the idea that there is no such thing as progress and that there will always be racism and oppression and poverty - it's really pessimistic.

If I were a sci-fi writer and wanted to buck the genre trends I would try and figure out how to make a Utopian vision not seem hokey but make it about how much society now sucks when it doesn't have to.

-"Children of Men" was one the better ones to come out recently.
-"Alien" and "Outland" are space movies but I like them because it's also like "Capitalism goes to space"
-If you want to see a great sci-fi movie that's also silly and awful, please see "Zardoz"

Books:
"Looking Backwards" - it's a Victorian Utopian sci-fi novel about a man who falls asleep and wakes up in a future without class conflict and poverty where everything is arranged and produced rationally (it was written in the 1880s and takes place in the 1980s which is kind of funny). It was a hugely popular book in the US due to major and violent labor battles after the Civil War and it was a favorite of many future revolutionaries like Eugene Debs.

"U.S." is kind of a distopian bookend to "Looking Backwards". In this book, socialist muckraking author Upton Sinclair is resurrected from the grave through the 1970s, 80s, and 90s:


"Are we Socialist yet?" asks the serial-resurrected Sinclair some hours after he has been pulled from the grave yet again. "Are we metric?"

[Stranger Than Paradise]

Also The Dispossessed would be a good book to read. Also Hello America by JG Ballard.

[ckaihatsu]

I'm interested in Utopia vs. Distopia. It's funny that from the Victorian era on to WWII sci-fi was more often Utopian whereas now it's almost all Distopian (except for the Star Trek shows). Some of my favorite sci-fi fiction is distopian, but I would love a return to the Utopian fiction of the past. It's like distopia reinforces the idea that there is no such thing as progress and that there will always be racism and oppression and poverty - it's really pessimistic.


Agreed.





Truffaut's Fahrenheit 451 is good.


Lately I've come to a reinterpretation of the premise in Fahrenheit 451 -- one can take it to be a social satire of *any* period in which the motivation for learning consists of turning oneself into a "living book". This would be an implicit critique of legalism and scholasticism in particular, or of any approach to societal governance that rests solely on the recitation of a canon.

Are there really "firemen" in existence whose occupation consists of methodically destroying the body of human culture (also in 'Equilibrium') -- ? Since there aren't -- *especially* in our Internet-enabled age of infinitely reproducible digital media -- it makes the overly bookish and bourgeois-formalistic types look positively *anxiety-ridden* by comparison in their never-ending quests for superiority over knowledge and trivia alike.





-If you want to see a great sci-fi movie that's also silly and awful, please see "Zardoz"


I have to defend 'Zardoz', along with 'Matrix' and 'eXistenZ', as one of the most profound and civilization-oriented works I've ever seen -- it's certainly underappreciated.

It deserves a more attentive treatment, but in a nutshell it speaks to the crisis of developed culture / civilization. It speaks in particular to the era of its making, when modernized comforts became commonplace in the developed Western world of the 1960s.

The scientists who banished death and created the advanced civilization, including the Tabernacle, for the Eternals did so only because of the crisis of the civilization in which they lived -- the movie seems to indicate a ceaseless world war, indicating a failure of humanity's will. By setting up a false dichotomy the scientists managed to *insulate*, or partition, aspects of the human societal psyche from *other* parts, but at the cost of introducing a schizophrenia overall.

Zed represents a forest fire that sweeps through the old growth, tearing down the stultification and knowledge-worship of the Eternals' insulated culture. In doing so he himself evolves up from being a mere Exterminator and acquires an appreciation for civilized life, going on to start and raise a family with Consuela.

There's also a theme of cyclicality in the story -- arguably revealing the flaw of its bourgeois-oriented origin: The line of protagonists thoughout the cyclical civilization saga seems to be the Zed - Zardoz - Friend - scientist cycle, representing savage - trickster - comrade - developer, respectively. This is the source of the movie's silliness, since it fails to take its subject matter more seriously, instead falling back on a lightheartedness summed up in lines like "It was all a joke" and "We've all been reused, abused, amused". (Yes, I took notes...!)

In a sense, 'Zardoz' *straddles* the line between utopian and dystopian fiction, dishing out heavy societal themes but at the same time coming to no definitive statement of its own on any of it.


Chris



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[brigadista]

im actually enjoying fringe at the moment

[JAH23]

Brazil is one of my favorite films of all time. The director, Terry gilliam originally titled it 1984 1/2. In my opinion, the movie depicts what a bureacratic government at its worst looks like. Not to mention it's magnificent cinematography. Definately reccomemd this film.

[Catbus]

Though 'Sunshine' isn't really dystopian, it paints space travel in a very different way than it's usually portrayed. I'd definitely recommend it.

[KurtFF8]

Another recent film about "capitalism going to space" would be "Moon" and I think it's a pretty good one.

[x359594]

..."Alien" and "Outland" are space movies but I like them because it's also like "Capitalism goes to space"...


Capitalism goes to space describes those movies accurately.

In many respects Alien was a post-Watergate movie, but the sequel Aliens was a Reganite movie inasmuch as the Cameron movie erased the plot point about the android having been programed by the Company to bring the alien life form back at all costs with the crew being dispensable. In the sequel the android's behavior is now said to have been a mechanical failure, and it's only a greedy executive that's responsible for the danger of the colonists instead of the system. Plus the remedy for the danger is to send in the Marines and nuke the planet at the end.