Personally, as is often noted, “Idiocracy” is probably tops for current events… but for the farther future, I’d go Blade Runner Universe, most likely… just for the sheer scale of total biosphere degradation and megacorp control. How about you?
Present day isn’t Idiocracy, in the Idiocracy the president cared about his people and listened to the world’s smartest man to fix the crops.
I’m pretty sure the idiot president thing has a shelf life, even. We’ll be back to clean-cut fascist dictators soon enough.
Cyberpunk but without the cool stuff like cyber ware or flying cars.
Flying cars were always dangerous and impractical in the places where they’d be needed, but I’m already in line for an implant that didn’t used to exist. Cyberware is basically just that on an elective basis, right?
We have crypto, talking computers and warfare looks like this:
Next up I’m waiting on crowded street markets lit by signage, although the trend towards delivering everything makes me doubt.
The one trope that can’t happen is corporations as government. Executives are not warlords, even if they think they are. Actual authoritarian regimes always end up looking like each other, and not like Google.
Brave New World needs an honourable mention for only looking more plausible a century later. We do like our horny birth control sex and not thinking too hard about sad things.
I hope for cyberpunk, because Star Trek (post-WWIII) isn’t gonna happen. Dune or a boring version of Terminator are also in the running, possibly at the same time.
Edit: A cyberpunk phase might give way to a far future that’s not exactly Star Trek, but that is similarly equal, tolerant and pleasant. I know that wasn’t the question, but that’s why it’s the direction I’m pushing for.
If it’s Dune, the last couple centuries were a blip, and the kind of violent autocratic hell that existed before that is just what human civilisation naturally looks like, so it will keep going. If it’s Terminator, hopefully the AI does something nice without us, at least.
The Expanse.
I agree, but only about the star of Earth in that series. The Epstein drive, protomolecule, even the colonization of Mars are all not guaranteed futures in my view. But if we keep going to way we are, yeah, I can see a 50+% unemployment rate and lots of brutalist architecture.
We have an optimist here.
You think the Expanse is optimistic? Did you read it?
No, only seen the show. Just a bit of nuking south america and water slavery. Seems optimistic enough, but perhaps the books show it’s worse then it looks in the show. But the post asks about movies, not books.
I mean, even in the show things are pretty bleak. There’s a bit where we see how earth is… not great unless you’re super wealthy.
But on the bright side, they do have UBI
Yes…
Warhammer 40k /s
Parable of the Sower.
Murderbot if we as a species ever make it that far
Quality land by Marc Uwe Kling. The world is basically ruled by hyper capitalistic cooperations, people are rated by their productivity people don’t buy stuff actively, it’s bought for them by their personal AI when the algorithm thinks they need it.
The plot partly follows the presidential election between an AI powered Robot that tries to act in the interest of humanity versus a populist right wing TV cook that’s a shockingly close prediction of Trump. The other part is about the main character on his mission to refund an item he didn’t actually want.
To this day my favourite dystopian book.
Elysium seems a good candidate.
Ratchet & Clank
Wondla
It’s not a sci-fi dystopia, but I just watched Zootopia again and the plot is harsher in hindsight. The villain is trying to gain power by turning everyone against a minority population and making them fear that minority. To think this came out before Trump’s first presidency.
Also the cops can do whatever they want with impunity.
By the end, judy is BFs with the biggest mob boss in town, who she knows kills people.
That bugged me too. I also saw Zootopia 2 today. SPOILER ALERT Nick leads a prison break with seemingly no consequences in the end
Well, this isn’t a unique concept. The fact it goes horrible pretty quickly and people keep falling for it is the truly impressive part.
Not exactly sci fi, but the TV adaptation of Handmaid’s Tale bears some striking parallels to the current renaissance that extreme right ideologies are currently enjoying. Off the top of my head…
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It shows how quickly and easily street-level enforcement of an authoritarian system can be implemented, and that there is no shortage of people willing to take on that role.
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It shows that the architects of an oppressive system aren’t necessarily “true believers” in such a system, nor are they held to the standards demanded of the average citizen.
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It shows how extremist ideologies bleed beyond the borders of one country and begin to infect others.
You can see examples of all three of these in what’s happening now.
I really don’t want to be living in a Margaret Atwood book.
I agree with you
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The Running Man novel is set in 2025 and the second movie adaptation just came out. Things aren’t as bad as they are portrayed there. Reality shows aren’t killing people yet. But people are going on exploitative reality shows because they feel desperate for money.
Not too far away yet.
There is a squid games reality show which is based on a game where they kill people, and they pretend to kill them in the show so it’s being normalized.
And Mr beast has his gameshow which is similar, where they treat the contestants inhumanly just for the convenience of the production.
I think the Wired of Serial Experiments Lain is pretty accurate.
Companies like Meta are actively trying to create an immersive digital world (the “metaverse”) like the Wired.
And the Wired is symbolic of the issues with the modern internet, from the escapism and addiction to rumors to false information shaping peoples views to companies controlling the world throigh algorithms and censorship.
The multiple Lains are symbolic of how everyone can a different view of you and your opinions, often shaped by lies, and the Wired Lain which is the one of these actually controlled by her is symbolic of how we act differently online than in real life.
Masami Eiri is symbolic of companies and powerful individuals controlling online narratives and owning most of the internet you interact with.
The Phantoma game is symbolic of how the things that happen and the things that are said online have real world consequences.
It is an absolutely brilliant show which I highly recommend watching if you like visual metaphors.
Back to the Future 2’s bad timeline.
wow. Surprisingly awesome answer. Biff’s Casino IS America right now
This was obvious even to me as a child when I watched the movie in the 90s.
Crazy that we need a writer to say it.
If you didn’t see the movies at the same time you were aware of who Trump was, what he looked like, and what his business plan stood for, you don’t necessarily get the connection. If you’re younger, the connection may not happen because BTTF is “1980s” and Trump is right here, right now. Or, yet Alternatively, you may just think Trump, Biff, and every other person in that social class just looked like that in the 80s
Trump was all over the media at that time, he was basically the archetype of the rich American villain in every 80s and 90s movie. Some More News did like a 2 hour video about it.
He was literally in Home Alone 2.
I’m glad it was obvious for you. It wasn’t for me. Aside from Biff being an existing 1985/1955 character prior to “Trump” Biff, the retrofuturistic dystopian 1985 in BTTF2 may as well be the decade before Robocop picks up in the same universe. It all looks the same to me, so I’m in the “that’s what the 80s looked like” boat. I offered alternative, reasonable options for why not everyone made the connection as well as you did. I mean, I bet more than half the people on this platform were born after Home Alone 2. Our classics are not their classics.
