Archive for the 'A Grim Vision of the Future' Category

Don’t let the lack of budget fool you– this movie is sort of deep. It’s a commentary on technology and the nature of humankind. well, sort of. It follows the trials of Starker, a guy on the run from two guys in  darkened office who follow his course around an unnamed city on their 80/88, [...]

Starring: Hugo Weaving, Natalie Portman
This movie, based on the graphic novel by Alan Moore and David Lloyd, comes off as a weird hybrid of 1984 and Zorro: The Gay Blade. Set in a futuristic, post-capitalistic Britain, where the police are brainless thugs, the Anglican Church has turned into a weird pseudo-Nazi regime, and women [...]

If you only see one Planet of the Apes movie this year, let it be this one. Captain Taylor, Cornelius, Zira, and all your hairy friends are back in a rip- rollicking romp across the surface of fortieth-century Earth. Everything is peachy until they discover– whoops!– a subterranean race of prehistoric humans who enshrine and [...]

This is what will happen if you vote for Pat Robertson! Starring: Natasha Richardson, Aidan Quinn, Faye Dunaway, Robert Duvall
Natasha Richardson stars in this Futuristic Dystopia about the US being taken over by a group of Right-Wing Fundamentalists. In the “recent future,” (?) industrial pollution in the environment has rendered 99% of [...]

Was the Great Depression really THAT depressing?! Starring: Kyle MacLachlan, Alison Eastwood, Aaron Pearl
OK, OK– this movie isn’t set in the future, but I’m still calling it “Futuristic.” So sue me! It didn’t really fit into any of the other categories so well.
This is the story of a small town in [...]

Starring: Nicole deBoer, Nicky Guadagni, David Hewlett, Maurice Dean Wint

Our story opens with a guy waking up in a strange room… He opens a hatch and goes into another room just like the one he was in… then he gets sliced up like a hard-boiled egg in one of those wire [...]

The Matrix

Starring: Keanu Reeves, Laurence Fishburne
Cube. The Matrix. Yes, Technology is the new threat. Everyone’s making films these days about people being menaced, or otherwise swallowed by technology. Maybe it’s because of the incredible popularity of Internet porn these days. Or maybe it’s just because of AOL.
This is a movie about computers evolving [...]

Starring: Craig Bierko, Armin Mueller-Stahl, Vincent D’Onofrio, Gretchen Moll
When I was in the video store, I overheard someone say “This makes The Matrix looks like child’s play!” Of course, I thought to myself, “Elmo in Grouchland makes The Matrix looks like child’s play,” but that’s another story. The Thirteenth Floor is another one [...]

Strange Days

Starring: Ralph Fiennes, Angela Bassett, Juliette Lewis
I actually watched this movie twice. The second time I saw it, I hadn’t realized that I’d already seen it a couple of years before until about half-way through. Even then, I finished watching it again simply because I couldn’t remember any of it. So here I [...]

Death Race 2000

Starring: David Carradine, Sylvester Stallone
This is my new favorite movie. I mean it! This film has everything! It’s the year 2000, and the United Provinces of America are gearing up to watch the most popular event of the year- a cross-country road race. The racers get bonus points for hitting pedestrians.
How [...]

Starring: Ricardo Montalban
Haven’t you always wanted to know what happens when superevolved Chimps from the 40th century fall through a time warp to the seventies? No? Well, they eat lots of oranges. The point of this movie seems to be to drive home the point that apes eat oranges. Apes eat oranges. [...]

BEE DEE BEE DEE BEE DEE… HOLY CRAP! Starring: Gil Gerard, Erin Gray

Holy cow! If our CGI scripts allowed, I would gladly give this movie 600 swiss cheeses for ridiculousness. Every detail of this movie is inconceivably schmaltzy. I’m lactose intolerant, and I think I was actually having a bad reaction to [...]

Insert your own catch phrase here. Starring: Arnold Schwarzenegger, Linda Hamilton, Edward Furlong
“Is this the one where he says ‘I’ll be back?’” “No, it’s the one where he says ‘hasta la vista, baby.’” That’s what I remember this film by, anyway. That and the fact that the plot gave me [...]

Total Recall

Am I out of my mind? Or were the screenwriters when they wrote this? Starring: Arnold Schwarzenegger, Sharon Stone, Rachel Ticotin
What if you could wake up and discover that you weren’t really who you thought you were, and that your whole life was really an implanted false memory? Personally, I’d be overjoyed. [...]

“Babe” meets “Lord of the Flies” Starring: Patrick Stewart, Ian Holm, Julia Louis-Dreyfus, Pete Postlethwaite, Kelsey Grammar
I guess this isn’t technically a “futuristic” Dystopia, since it takes place in the past, but it contains all of the elements of that genre. Since there’s no “antiquated Dystopia” category, just deal with the inaccuracy! [...]

Logan’s Run

Starring: Michael York, Jenny Agutter
This is just such a fantastic movie in so many ways. Imagine a subterranean paradise whose inhabitants enjoy good food, uninhibited sex and free plastic surgery. Then, at the age of 30, they spontaneously combust, in a ritual the City dwellers call “Carousel.” That is, except for [...]

Johnny Mnemonic

Starring: Keanu Reeves
Just watching Keanu Reeves “act” is cheesy enough for my book. He made a brilliant Bill, in the demi-eponymous Excellent Adventure, but I just can’t take him seriously as anything else! Reeves stars as Johnny (no last name), an information smuggler of the year 2021. He has deleted the childhood [...]

Miracle Mile

Starring: Anthony Edwards, Mare Winningham, Mykel T. Williamson
Was Denise Crosby born with two-tone hair? I ask because I don’t think I’ve ever seen her with a monotone hairdo before. Anyway, this film is about the end of the world. It’s a delightfully cheesy romp into what might happened in L.A. if everyone [...]

Futuresport

Starring: Wesley Snipes, Vanessa Williams, Dean Cain
I was really psyched when I saw this, because it predicts that we’ll have anti-gravitational skateboards in 27 years. Oh, and Chelsea Clinton will be president. Anti-gravitational skateboards will be fun! Of course, that’s a lot of technological advancing to do in a couple of decades, [...]

Starring: Don Johnson, Julie Kavner, Sharon Gless
If you thought the original Stepford Wives was draggy, never fear. This fast-paced made-for-tv movie combines all of the good elements of the original with a rollicking good time. It’s 10 years later in the sleepy hamlet of Stepford. Things are still Perfect. So perfect, in [...]