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



Soylent Green

Starring: Charlton Heston
It’s the year 2022 and the population of New York is 40 million people! People are forced to do things like sleep on staircases and eat little freeze-dried wafers of food made by the Soylent corporation. Soylent comes in three flavors: Red, Yellow, and Green, but Green is what people [...]

The Omega Man

Starring: Charlton Heston, Rosalind Cash
Welcome to the so-called future, where little scraps of paper blow through the empty streets of LA! (I think that was supposed to make LA seem deserted, but they kind of overdid it.) Anyway, as you can imagine, germ warfare has all but destroyed mankind. The lone survivor, [...]

Starring: Jason Patric, Jami Gertz
How could I resist “spectacular sci-fi action and adventure on blazing skates?!” The Solarbabies are “the far-off future’s spunkiest group of roller-skating rowdies!”

It’s the year 41 (you know, the year 41 in the far-off future) and the Earth is a post-apocalyptic desert starved of water. The few [...]

Fahrenheit 451

Starring: Oskar Werner, Julie Christie
This is the future as it is meant to be: monorails, sliding doors, guys in flying jet suits… The only thing wrong is that you’re not allowed to possess books. People sit glued to wall-sized tv screens which double as a ‘family.’ You read the book. You remember [...]

The Net

Starring: Sandra Bullock
The only thing less believable than Sandra Bullock as a computer nerd with no life is this film’s plot. There’s a mega conspiracy involving the government, airplanes, even your friendly neighborhood pharmacist.
Sandra Bullock runs around in anguish in her belly-button revealing shirts as people change her identity, kill her [...]

Form of a Plot Device! Shape of a Fight Scene! Starring: Hugh Jackman, Anna Paquin, Patrick Stewart, Ian McKellen, Bruce Davison
In the not-so-distant future, pollution caused by the Atomic Age has triggered the so-called “X-Factor” in humans, a genetic sequence that triggers useful and glamorous mutations. People with this X-Factor develop [...]

Rollerball

Glimpse into a bright orange future. Starring: James Caan
Oof! Let me say right now that we only watched half of this movie! It was too boring! It’s actually very rare that we turn a video off before it’s finished– but this one was an exception! Maybe we would have enjoyed this film [...]

The Matrix

Starring: Keanu Reeves, Laurence Fishburne
First of all, Laurence Fishburne will always be Cowboy Curtis to me, even so, he’s pretty good at kicking butt. But that aside, this film was pretty funny. Somehow, artificial intelligence has enslaved humanity to use it for the energy it produces, since the humans destroyed the sun, or [...]

The Postman

Starring: Kevin Costner
The USA is a barren, desolate, post-apocalyptic wasteland. The year is 2014. Kevin Costner is a drifter who travels from each small isolated outpost to the next with his mule doing one-man Shakespearean revues. He ends up conquering the white supremacist bad guy army by starting a postal service. Go [...]

The Stepford Wives

Pretty Joanna almost has it all. She has two intensely white children, an ugly husband who makes lots of money, and a gallery in New York that thinks her snapshots of her kids playing on their swingset are the greatest thing to happen to modern art since “Piss Christ.” But then Joanna’s life becomes a [...]

They Live

Starring: Rowdy Rod Piper
This is a low-brow science fiction epic with many homoerotic touches, featuring Pro-Wrestler Rod Piper at his rowdy best. The basic idea is that purple, gelatinous aliens come down to Earth and enslave us all, by replacing our familiar USAToday with subliminal messages of submission and conformity which we [...]

THX 1138

Starring: Robert Duvall, Maggie McOmie, Donald Pleasance
I actually love this movie in a non-ironic way, despite the fact that it’s utterly cheesy. In the future, people shave their heads and dress in white. The government prescribes mass doses of pills to eliminate things like emotion and free will. Sex is illegal. The [...]