"Why is the future on film always so grim?"

[clarence]

[…]

 

"In dystopian films, for which Blade Runner or Judge Dredd often provide the template, there is usually very little in the way of high-quality mass transit, epicurean-quality food is hard to come by, and everyone looks as if they got their fashion cues from Alice Cooper. Also, France no longer seems to exist in the future. Women wear a lot of mascara in dystopian societies. So do men. Even in the distant future, harmless, non-threatening young people will get tattoos in a desperate attempt to make themselves look scary. And as a general rule, whenever the camera descends into the lair of the rebel nerd who is trying to stymie the forces of darkness, the geeky upstart will be working on a computer that looks as if it was designed in 1978. It’s as though the smartwatch never happened."

 

[…]

 

 

Read the rest of it here : )

 

http://www.theguardian.com/film/2015/mar/19/dystopian-films-blade-runner-insurgent-future-grim

[threedeesix]

Interesting article. I think I was most excited about the link to Blade Runner 2 that popped up.

 

I didn't know.

 

Cant wait.

[seneschal]

The whole cyberpunk thing is basically a Marxist vision of the end of Western capitalistic civilization:  the mega-rich elite businessmen exploiting their hordes of mindless wage slaves until the oppressed proletariat, spurred by charismatic leaders, rises up to claim its freedom.  Hmmm, we've all seen how that worked out in Russia, China, Cambodia and Cuba.  Throw in 1960s and '70s era Cold War fears and you get the typical modern post-apocalyptic drama.  I helped my Mom study Marx and Engels for one of her college classes before I attempted to read Walter Gibson's novels.  When I broke open the latter, I said, "Hey, waitaminute!  I've read this all before (minus the cool gear)."

 

The Postman -- the original novel by David Brin, not the movie -- turns the genre on its head.  The protagonist restores civilization, not by leading a rebellion or by defeating an army, but by encouraging people to communicate with each other and to return to the traditional American values they'd temporarily lost faith in.  Likewise, both Buck Rogers in the 25th Century and Star Trek envision mankind pushing through troubled times into an even more prosperous and advanced society.  In both sagas bad things did happen -- the Han Dominion, the Eugenics Wars -- but history didn't stop there.

 

Dystopian filmmakers, in contrast, want to hit the pause button when things are at their worst.  If they were doing Lord of the Rings, they'd end the movie with the Nazgul  bursting through the gates of Minas Tirith because elitists don't believe what the little people do matters.  It reflects a certain cynical worldview, where rebellion isn't a last-ditch defense against evil but a virtue in its own right -- because if I'm not in the top 1 percent then obviously whoever is running things is on the take. 

[soltakss]

Cyberpunk-style films take a certain view and then push it as far as they can. 

 

Big Corporations rule the world, either implicitly or explicitly, people are simple resources, dollar is king (or yen or whatever) and technology is either a curse or a saviour. You could look at the modern world and see what is happening with globalisation and so on, to see that there might be a ring of truth to that. However, films take this to the nth degree.

 

A lot of these films were planned in,or made by people living in, the 70s and 80s, the time of punks, new romantics, goths and so on. That has influenced the look and feel of these films. Also, films such as Mad Max and Bladerunner have had a massive influence. 

[lawrence.whitaker]

I found the article lazy - and inaccurate.

 

A few technical notes: dystopian films are set in future societies where civilisation has broken down

 

 

Um, no, not always. There are plenty of dystopian films where civilization has not broken down at all: sometimes, dystopia reflects how crushingly repressive civilization can be.

 

 

But please, don't generalise... I mean, it's not like you don't have this is contemporary or historical dramas - or even right now, in real life.

 

 

I see, so those high rise mega buildings in Dredd (where all the action takes place) and Minority Report are figments of the imagination are they? Or how about Metropolis, arguably first, best and most influential of the dystopian SF films ever made?

 

A lazy, slightly snide, slightly smug article that ignores 100 years of SF before it. A typical Grauniad piece, actually.

[threedeesix]

A lazy, slightly snide, slightly smug article that ignores 100 years of SF before it. A typical Grauniad piece, actually.

 

But again, there was a separate link to a Blade Runner sequel. So there's that.

[lawrence.whitaker]

But again, there was a separate link to a Blade Runner sequel. So there's that. 

Ah, I wish I could agree, Rod, but I think a Blade Runner sequel is a bad idea. A terrible idea. I would have thought it a bad idea even if Sir Ridley Scott hadn't made 'Prometheus', but the fact that he did make 'Prometheus' just makes me feel that a Blade Runner sequel is the baddest of bad ideas that's been expelled from Bad Idea school for being hopelessly bad.

 

And Blade Runner's one of my favourite films - perhaps my favourite film.

[threedeesix]

Ah, I wish I could agree, Rod, but I think a Blade Runner sequel is a bad idea. A terrible idea.

 

We can still be friends.

 

At least its not a reboot.

[Mankcam]

Well...its the billion dollar question...its either a really good idea or a really bad one!

[seneschal]

"... the geeky upstart will be working on a computer that looks as if it was designed in 1978."

 

The obvious reason is the time period many of the dystopian novels that inspired the movies were published in.  But there are in-story possibilities.  The most current gear is really expensive and easily traceable.  It does cool stuff but Big Brother instantly knows where you are.  On the other hand, obsolete equipment -- which can be made to work with ingenuity and an open-source OS -- is slower but also cheaper and harder for the authorities to locate since your info is saved on a hard drive instead of the cloud, is operated by ancient, arcane software almost nobody remembers anymore, and saves data to floppies (a strange name since they are stiff) instead of sending it wirelessly through the ether.

[fmitchell]

It's a truism that science fiction is more about the time in which it was written than the time in which it is set.  (Which is why Blade Runner belongs back in the 1980s.)

 

Also, Utopias make for dull stories.  Either you have to postulate a threat from outside the Utopia (e.g. Klingons, Sith, Daleks) or reveal the Utopia's "dark secret" (soma, Morlocks, Carousel).

 

Finally, every period has challenges that inevitably raise the question, "what if this gets worse?"  H.G. Wells envisioned European imperialism turned against Europe, so he wrote War of the Worlds.  In the 1950s the Red Scare inspired numerous alien invasion flicks.  In the 1960s-1970s civil rights and environmentalism came to the fore, so we got Soylent Green among many others.  In the 1980s corporate greed and the Internet inspired cyberpunk.  Today, we've got the persistence of Christian extremism, the rise of Muslim extremism, global warming, global recession, global terrorism, a widening gap between rich and poor ... so many catastrophes to choose from.

[MrJealousy]

Optimistically, directors and authors attempt to inform, or maybe warn, the masses in the hope that they wont let it happen for real.

However, we are already living in a dystopian future, the films just dress it up in neon and lens flare.

 

I work in local government and one of the most disturbing things that happened a few years ago was that they started referring to people as resources! When they talk about redistributing resources, they aren't talking about moving tables and chairs and computers, they are talking about people as though they are tables and chairs and computers.

 

When they restructure these 'resources' they seem to be surprised to find that they don't always fit into their expected boxes. Which usually prompts another restructure...

 

Still, I love dystopia! Almost as much as apathetic nihilism and armchair anarchy

[TRose]

1.  Might as well ask why all corporation use Assassins and ruthless mercenaries to get what they want instead of using Lawyers and going  elsewhere to buy what resources they want.( Like in real life)
2.  If an "Evil " corporation when blocked from getting trees from one forests shrugs it shoulders and gets it trees from a forest a few hundred miles away there no story. If on the on  the other hand they hire hundreds of goons and use attack helicopters to get those trees ,you got a blockbuster film.
3.  And as people have said utopia can be boring.. Imagine roleplaying in a game where there are no bad guys, no evil to vanquish or rights to wrong . How long would that last.

[seneschal]

 

1.  And as people have said utopia can be boring.. Imagine roleplaying in a game where there are no bad guys, no evil to vanquish or rights to wrong . How long would that last.

 

True.  But in dystopian stories the bad guys have pretty much won.  Good had its chance and muffed it.  The plucky freedom fighters lost the revolutionary war.  The Sheriff executed Robin Hood.  Lex Luthor  kicked Superman's butt and took over.  Sure, a token resistance struggles to maintain its existence, but without outside intervention from a greater power no real victory is possible.  Imagine the fate of French partisans during World War II if the Allies had lost.  Dystopias are what one discussion board GM called "crapsack worlds," where things are rotten all over.  It's the scenario of X-Men:  Days of Future Past or Batman:  The Dark Knight Returns or Blake's Seven.  If an overabundance of righteousness is boring, the triumph of evil is depressing.  If the player-characters absolutely can't win, if all their victories are ultimately meaningless and hollow, why bother?

[threedeesix]

True.  But in dystopian stories the bad guys have pretty much won.  Good had its chance and muffed it. 

 

Where this isn't the case, is with the "apparent" utopian society that hides the truth. For example, in The Time Machine, utopia was a sham and the protagonist over through it. The same can be said of the movie version of Logan's Run. Within the dome was utopia, but it was a lie, true freedom lay outside the dome, in the ruins of the former civilization. Again, it took the protagonist to bring it down.

 

Another GREAT example is the cinematic trailer of the upcoming Tom Clancy game The Division. Its a dystopian society in every sense of the word, but the player characters are trying to make a difference. Check out the link below, its a good example.

 

 

Rod

[TRose]

 

 

  I think the apparent Utopiawith a dark underlining is more accurate for the future.

 

 Well I would not mind, but then I would refuse to accept the fact I cannot win. I look at books like Robert   a Heinlein  Revolt in 2100 or the Hunger Games. At the beginning there seems no hope of a Revolt winning but at the end the bad guys get their butt kicked.

[Ian A. Thomson]

On 3/23/2015 at 7:25 AM, Mankcam said:

Well...its the billion dollar question...its either a really good idea or a really bad one!

Turned out to be a 'meh' idea :)

[Ian Absentia]

15 hours ago, Ian A. Thomson said:

Turned out to be a 'meh' idea 🙂

Are we still talking about Blade Runner 2049 seven years later?  If so, I feel that it's a film that, like it's predecessor, will be most appreciated in retrospect.  Once again, the audience largely mistook the A Story for the B Story and the B for the A, and thought it was supposed to be an action movie.  It's a transcendental love story, like the original, hidden in plain sight.

!i!

[Rob Darvall]

On 3/23/2015 at 8:48 AM, fmitchell said:

Today, we've got the persistence of Christian extremism, the rise of Muslim extremism, global warming, global recession, global terrorism, a widening gap between rich and poor ... so many catastrophes to choose from.

I'd hypothesise that todays is the Zombie flick'; an upgrade on Day of the Triffids, but it's usually still our fault. The Zombies are current angst about our own self-immolation.

[svensson]

There has always been a certain pendulum in the public perception of 'the future' that is reflected in that culture's art.

Just look at some the letters written by monks at the turn of the Millennium in the late 900s and the similarities between those and and the media of 1990s.

Since about 1990 or so, the average person in the G-8 nations [the people that produce the culture-influencing art, the people that run the internet, the people that are writing the historical record] feels that corporatization and technology are devaluing everything that makes us human, that for every advance in technological capability there are two steps backwards in our appreciation for literature, poetry, and art. People are worried that they'll be replaced by AI's and robots in almost every sphere of human endeavor, from art to sex.

And no one with the power to effect things even seems to care. If it'll make them money, they'll do it and damn the consequences.

[Questbird]

If you look around today's world, maybe some sci-fi authors ought to start writing us some escapist utopias..

[soltakss]

Quote

"Why is the future on film always so grim?"

I am living in the dystopian future from my childhood.

• Walls built to keep poor people out of rich countries
• Refugees and migrants treated appallingly
• AI apparently stealing the livelihood from artists and writers
• Water shortages, widespread hunger
• Catastrophic climate events
• Paramilitary police everywhere
• Governments using extra-judicial killings with impunity
• Robots used for mundane tasks
• An underclass trapped by poverty and the privilege of others

 

[Agentorange]

Also there's not a great deal of cinematic tension to be derived from a well run, happy society where nothing adverse ever happens.......at least not in the field of Sci Fi and fantasy.

In other genres of course there's much more optimism. Every rom com ever shown has love overcoming all for a happy ending........

[Qizilbashwoman]

On 3/23/2023 at 4:53 AM, svensson said:

for every advance in technological capability there are two steps backwards in our appreciation for literature, poetry, and art

i mean, as an american most of my friends are concerned more with the immediate reality of survival. 60% of americans live month-to-month!

[Bill the barbarian]

On 3/20/2015 at 2:55 PM, clarence said:

[…]

 

"In dystopian films,

<snip>

Read the rest of it here : )

 

http://www.theguardian.com/film/2015/mar/19/dystopian-films-blade-runner-insurgent-future-grim

going with Jim here
The future's uncertain and the end is always near

 

58 minutes ago, Agentorange said:

Also there's not a great deal of cinematic tension to be derived from a well run, happy society where nothing adverse ever happens.......at least not in the field of Sci Fi and fantasy.

In other genres of course there's much more optimism. Every rom com ever shown has love overcoming all for a happy ending........

Sci Fi, the perfect antidote for Rom Com overdose!

 

14 minutes ago, Qizilbashwoman said:

i mean, as an american most of my friends are concerned more with the immediate reality of survival. 60% of americans live month-to-month!

It's enough to make one cry!

Edited March 26, 2023 by Bill the barbarian