Blade Runner

Blade Runner's city, with its composite of time and place and its references, through architecture and fashions, to the 40s, conjures up memories of one of the blackest periods of human history: the `Fall' of humanity, linked with the domination of people perceived as the non-human enemy and therefore as subjects for brutality and experimentation in the Nazi eugenics programme, the concentration camps, the gas chambers, and as targets for nuclear bombs.
Not only does the film reveal ourselves to ourselves as many of the genre's stories do, but it also leads us to question the actions that have brought our world to this dystopia in which human dominance is affecting the well-being of other humans and other species.
Blade Runner (Director's Cut)
THX-1138

Suppression is the theme of the day in this film. Emotion and desire are squashed by the overrulling androids, and are the key to humanity and freedom. Efficiency overrides every other aspect of human life, as people are reduced to code names and their lives are contained, monitored, and manipulated for the sake of the system.
This white-washed future nightmare draws heavily on 1984, but remains a much more accessible imagining of the premise than the movie adaptation of Orwell's book starring John Hurt. There are, however some obvious differences between the two, most significantly being each's variation on the 'look and feel' of totalitarianism. Lucas' version is very stark and clean, notoriusly shot almost entirely in a white room, while your typical setting for the fall of man tends to be given more emphasis on decay.
This movie is also particularly note-worthy for its accomplishment in the field of sound design and recording.
THX 1138
Soylent Green

Heston plays the 'everyman', in this case a police detective trying to solve the murder of one of the Soylent Corporation's board members. Through his investigation he begins to uncover a strange conspiracy involving the corporation, which leads to the answer to the film's tagline "What's the secret of Soylent Green?"
This film, now often parodied thanks to Heston's over-the-top portrayal of the main character, is a dark vision of what could lie in the future for a civilization that has yet to address it's propensity to consume without question.
Soylent Green
Mad Max

Following the successful rousing of motor-gang lieutenant, hesitant police patrolman Max (Mel Gibson) gets a shiny new ride, some leathers, and a pricetag on his head courtesy of the gang he's just messed with. The gang members try to get their evens with Max by brutally killing his Wife, Son and best friend. Understandably distraught, and aided by general prevelance of anarchy in the area, Max returns the favour by slaughtering gang members one by one. He then rides off into the sunset, leaving corpses and his past in his wake.
The dystopian quotient is more of an afterthought in this film-- tossed in as a way of convincing more people that such violence would be possible. What the film became, other than being the movie with the highest cost to gross ratio until the Blair Witch Project, was the progenitor of what has become the typical post-apocalyptic setting.
Mad Max
Brazil

The film captures the paranoid-subversive spirit of Kafka's The Trial (along with Gilliam's own Python animation) in this nightmare-comedy about a meek governmental clerk named Sam Lowry whose life is destroyed by a simple bug. Not a software bug, a real bug (no doubt related to Kafka's famous Metamorphosis insect) that gets smooshed in a printer and causes a typographical error unjustly identifying an innocent citizen, one Mr. Buttle, as suspected terrorist Harry Tuttle (Robert De Niro). When Sam becomes enmeshed in unraveling this bureaucratic glitch, he himself winds up labeled as a miscreant.
Exploring the overwhelmingly innefficient and tiresome possibilities of the Information Age, this film is probably more relevant today than it was when it was first produced.
Brazil (Criterion) (Box Set)
Fahrenheit 451

The story takes place in an unspecified future time, possibly sometime in the twenty-first century, in an America which has turned hedonistic and rabidly anti-intellectual, accompanied by the complete abandonment of self-control. At this point, books have been made obsolete due to the increasingly frenetic pace of life and the ever-shortening attention span of the common man — nobody has "time" to read anymore, and possession of books has been forbidden; the minimum punishment is confinement in a mental hospital and having one's house, books and all, burnt by "firemen"; and the maximum, is immediate death.
The result is a society that is emotionally unstable, its citizens often anxious, sad, or angry, and disruptive to society and full of nonsense. Enter the protagonist, one Guy Montag, who's previously contented life with his over-stimulated wife is put to question with the discovery of a mistress who's love of information causes him to look at his existance in a new light and subsequently descend into radicalism.
Fahrenheit 451
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