People expect me to love sci-fi, but to me it’s just one more genre.

In general, I don’t really care about genres. I like stories and characters and ideas. Where and how those are presented is just a set of tools, not something to put on a pedestal. However, I do care about the meanings of genres. Sci-fi is supposed to be the “what if” genre where you take the world and change something to speculate on how that would affect society and culture. Sure, sci-fi is often linked to technology, but that is just one specific area where we can speculate.

But there needs to be that speculation. Unlike what IMDb says, Empire Strikes Back is not dystopian sci-fi. It’s not even sci-fi. It’s science fantasy. And yes, I keep pointing this out and I always mention that even George Lucas agrees with me on this.

That being said, these are movies where that something changed and we get to speculate about the results and those results included a horrible society. Not that utopian sci-fi is much better. They have a tendency to turn out to have been dystopian as well, because someone is paying the price for some other segment to thrive. Like our world.

A Clockwork Orange (1971)

A good example of how sci-fi doesn’t need to have much to do with technology. Society has shifted and caused roaming youth gangs to take over the night. They steal and rape and fight with each other, with no real goal. They just do it to do it. In the book, they are just kids, in the movie they are young adults. There is, of course, the section where the tech comes in when our protagonist is brainwashed to cause him to hate violence in all it’s forms. However, that’s not really that memorable to me, even though it is a major part of the story.

The Lobster (2015)

Again, the technology is not that big part of the story. Sure, it matters, but it might as well be imprisonment or death penalty, but instead they punish people by transforming them into animals. At least they let the person choose their animal, where the name comes from as our main character wants to be a lobster.

So, why are they being transformed into animals? Because they can’t maintain a relationship. If they don’t have one, they are sent to this camp where they need to find someone, which leads to a lot of very dry humor around lies people tell to each other and themselves to have that human connection. How topical.

Mad Max: Fury Road (2015)

This is just the best action film of all time. Period. And yet, the truly great part is the worldbuilding, like the War Boys, who are a cult formed out of being manipulated by an older male role model. How topical. Okay, I won’t do that again.

WALL-E (2008)

Upon release, this was actually the most expensive movie of all time per minute. (At 180 million and just over 80 minutes, it cost over 2 million a minute.)

WALL-E has been left to clean up Earth while humans are in space to wait. Humans are not doing well. Having lost all ability to think and even see the world outside of the monitor they are constantly staring at while laying on their vehicles. How topical. (Okay, that was the last one.)

Children of Men (2006)

Births have collapsed to the point of no children having been born for a long while. When a young woman who happens to pregnant is found, certain people want to control her, because they see her as a political tool. Hmm… women losing their autonomy? I’m not going to say it, but I’m going to force you to think it.

This includes one of my favorite scenes of all time when people first react to the newly born child.

Akira (1988)

This is just a glorious mess.

RoboCop (1987)

With an honorary mention for Starship Troopers.

Paul Verhoeven is old enough to have witnessed the German occupation of his native country of Netherlands. He wasn’t very old at the time (he was born in 1938), but the horrors of war must have been traumatic. So, is it any wonder he likes to make fun of fascism? Combine that with corporate power and the rise of AI, and this movie suddenly turns very topical.

Metropolis (1927)

Well, this would be topical, except that the happy ending of this movie just seems too impossible.

Humanity has been divided into the rich and the poor. They live in completely different circumstances and away from each other. Most of the rich don’t even know about the poor and seem to be stupid enough not to ask questions about how their world is being run. The few rich people who do know, want to get rid of the poor.

Our actual rich people do actually fantasize about getting rid of the poor, so…

Blade Runner 2049 (2017)

This has just upended the original Blade Runner for me (except for Rutger Hauer, of course). This is topical in a somewhat problematic way, though. There’s a lot of discussion about the autonomy and rights of AIs, but that is not the discussion we need with the current, shitty generation of LLMs masquerading as intelligent. There are a lot of much more pertinent topics.

Now, here’s a good use for AI: Remove Jared Leto from this movie.

Batoru rowaiaru (Battle Royale, 2000)

Kids don’t behave anymore, so why not put them into a situation where they need to kill each other to survive? Yeah, this is wild.