Dystopian science fiction cinema found its founding image in Berlin in 1927, when Fritz Lang’s Metropolis premiered with its city of rich masters above and workers below. Nearly a century on, the films that followed still share its shape, a future where the few run everything and the many keep the machine turning. Here is how the genre grew, from Lang and H.G. Wells to Kubrick, George Miller and Alfonso Cuarón, and nine films to start with.
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Where the bad future began
Dystopian cinema has a founding film, and it is almost a century old. Empire says Fritz Lang’s Metropolis is considered the first science fiction film, and that its design set the template for a long line of movies that followed. The BFI’s greatest films poll describes it as a picture of a future built on profound inequality, and credits it with shaping generations of genre film-makers.
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Variety reviewed it in 1927, and its critic was dazzled by the look and unmoved by the story. The German studio UFA had been promoting the film for a year, and the paper reported a cost of 7 million marks, about $1.68 million. On camera work and direction, the reviewer called it something entirely new. The weak link, in that review, was Thea von Harbou’s script, which gave Lang strong scenes but led nowhere.
The plot Variety summarised still sounds familiar. A millionaire rules the city from above, and his son falls for a young woman from the workers’ city underground, where she preaches goodwill. At the father’s request an inventor builds an artificial human in her image. The double urges the workers to destroy the machines that keep everything running, and they do. Brigitte Helm, who played both women, struck the reviewer as a real find.
Making it was punishing. Empire notes that the shoot was as hard on Lang’s actors and extras as the story is on their characters, and that the burning at the stake used real flames.
A city that runs on its workers
Film Comment points out that Metropolis has long been read as a parable about capitalism. Its ending reconciles the “Hands”, a labourer, with the “Head”, the boss Fredersen, through the “Heart” of his son Freder. That shape, a ruling class above and a working class below, with the machine between them, is the one dystopian cinema kept returning to.
Even the year it imagines is disputed. Variety’s 1927 review placed the city 100 years ahead, and The Guardian’s Steve Rose says Lang set it a century on, which would put it in 2026. The BFI disagrees. It says Lang left the date undefined, and that it was Giorgio Moroder’s 1984 re-edit that fixed the story in 2026.
Britain imagines the next war
Britain was picturing disaster on screen even earlier than Lang. Two short films, Airship Destroyer (1909) and Aerial Anarchists (1911), imagined an air raid on Britain before the First World War had started. In 1929 a Gaumont-British feature, High Treason, split the world into an American power and a European one, and drove them towards war. It is set in 1940, and its twist is that greedy arms makers are playing both sides. The BFI still judges Things to Come (1936) the more prophetic film.
The war itself interrupted the run. According to the BFI, science fiction lost its audience in Britain during the war years, as it did in America. It came back in the 1950s, after the atomic bombs fell on Hiroshima and Nagasaki in August 1945. The first screen version of George Orwell’s Nineteen Eighty-Four, a novel published in 1949, played directly on that fear of the bomb and on the divisions of the early Cold War.
The film-makers who built it
Fritz Lang
The Observer’s critic reviewed the restored Metropolis in 2010, and called Lang one of the greatest artists of the 20th century, and perhaps the most innovative and influential figure cinema has produced. Lang was one of the few directors to build major bodies of work both in silent film and after sound arrived. The same critic first saw Metropolis as a schoolboy, 60 years earlier, in the shortened version that was then the only one anyone could see. He had been under its spell ever since.
H.G. Wells and William Cameron Menzies
The next pioneer came from literature. For Things to Come (1936), H.G. Wells wrote his first screenplay, adapted from his own novel The Shape of Things to Come, and the BFI says he was given an extraordinary degree of control. The story crosses a century in a town called Everytown. It moves from a present under threat of war into a long global conflict, in which “the wandering sickness” kills more than half the population. Then come a feudal 1960s and finally a space age that holds out hope.
William Cameron Menzies, a pioneer of special effects, directed it, and the Ealing editor Charles Crichton helped cut it. The BFI concedes that modern audiences may laugh at the costumes and the speeches. It still finds enough visual invention to match Wells’s earnest lessons in civics.
The post-war shock
After the bomb, the pioneers turned to what would be left. Chris Marker’s La Jetée, which the BFI counts among the most acclaimed short films ever made, tells a time-travel story almost entirely in still photographs. Marker called it a “photo-roman”. Only one moment moves, and it is an eye opening. Its hero, a Parisian from a radioactive future, is sent back to try to stop the Third World War. The BFI points to Terry Gilliam’s Twelve Monkeys as its Hollywood homage.
Peter Watkins went further, into something close to documentary. His 1965 BBC film The War Game imagined a nuclear attack on Britain. The BFI says it was judged so harrowing that it reached television only 20 years later. Before it aired, it had already collected an Oscar, for best documentary in 1967, and a BAFTA as best short. Watkins built it from reports on Second World War firestorms and on Hiroshima and Nagasaki, and narrated it in a clipped British voice that makes the horror flatter and worse.
Stanley Kubrick
Kubrick came at the end of the world from two directions. Dr Strangelove is his attack on America’s cold-war mindset, and The Guardian ranks it among the all-time great comedies. It closes on a montage of nuclear blasts with Vera Lynn singing over them. The BFI’s poll calls it a mordant Cold War comedy, with Peter Sellers playing three separate roles.
Then, in 1971, came A Clockwork Orange, adapted from Anthony Burgess’s 1962 novella about ultra-violent youth gangs in a future Britain. Its characters speak a mock-Russian slang mixed with a strange version of Cockney rhyming slang. The film had a second life off screen. Kubrick, shaken by press reports of real crimes said to copy it, had Warner Bros withdraw it from distribution in Britain. The Guardian calls that a remarkable show of a director’s power over a studio, and the ban stood, in theory, until his death in 1999.
George Miller
The man who took dystopia to the Australian outback was a doctor first. George Miller shot his debut, Mad Max (1979), in 12 weeks for about $450,000, and helped raise the money by working shifts as an emergency room doctor. The BFI notes the irony, given what the film is about. Its violence split critics, but it was a hit, taking nearly $6m at home and, by the BFI’s figure, £100m worldwide. Miller cast real bikers in many roles, and patched up wrecked cars to use again.
Terry Gilliam
Terry Gilliam was born in Minneapolis in 1940, and grew up an illustrator. A job at HELP! magazine in New York brought him to John Cleese, and from there into Monty Python. The idea for Brazil came from a visit to the steel town of Port Talbot. He imagined a beach black with coal dust, and a radio on it playing exotic music. The song in his head began as Ry Cooder’s Maria Elena and became Ary Barroso’s Aquarela do Brasil. Gilliam says he had never read Nineteen Eighty-Four, though he knew its tone, and that he once thought of calling his film Nineteen Eighty-Four-and-a-Half.
Which films defined the genre
Metropolis, rescued
The founding film nearly disappeared. Lang spent more than a year on Metropolis, his most expensive picture, only to watch it shown around the world in shortened, re-edited versions. The public was puzzled, and critics were often scornful, H.G. Wells among them.
It survived in tattered, faded prints that film societies showed to excited audiences, and in stills reproduced in books. Philip French, in The Observer, says it became one of the landmarks of world cinema. Getting it back to its original 150 minutes turned into the holy grail of film archivists. In 2008 a near-complete copy turned up in Buenos Aires, where a collector had kept it, and it restored about 25 minutes that explained much of what earlier prints left obscure.
The 1970s: control and appetite
George Lucas’s THX 1138 grew out of his own student film. Variety reviewed it in March 1971 and called it a psychedelic horror story about a future society run as computer-programmed slavery. In its world, drug use and sexual suppression are compulsory, and the worst crimes are avoiding your drugs and having sex. Robert Duvall plays the man who tries to escape, and Walter Murch, who co-wrote it, built its sound montages.
Variety thought it would fail in its own time. Its reviewer guessed it might one day become a classic of stylish, abstract cinema, and added that everyone would know for sure in about a generation.
A Clockwork Orange arrived the same year. The BFI’s greatest films poll sums it up as Kubrick’s stylish, controversial take on Burgess. A teenage gang leader treats a dystopian future London as his playground, in a story about violence and free will. The Guardian ranks it fourth among Kubrick’s films, behind Barry Lyndon, which its critic calls the more perfect achievement.
The road and the wasteland
In Australia, Miller’s sequel raised the stakes. Mad Max 2 (1981) had ten times the budget of the first film, and was at the time the most expensive film ever made in the country. By now the collapse that the first film hinted at is complete. Max drifts through the desert in his Ford XB Falcon Coupe, and the BFI says the stunts still astonish.
The 1980s: neon and rain
Ridley Scott’s Blade Runner came out in 1982. Empire describes its Los Angeles of 2019 as a flame-belching hellscape, where Harrison Ford’s Rick Deckard hunts escaped Replicants and comes to doubt his own humanity. It is based on Philip K Dick’s novel Do Androids Dream of Electric Sheep?, with a synth score by Vangelis and Rutger Hauer’s “tears in rain” speech. Empire calls it a masterpiece that audiences first misread, and says it took decades and several recuts to reach its standing.
The BFI pairs it with Akira (1988), and calls the two of them among the most influential dystopian films ever made. Both were set in 2019. Both imagined cities crowded with neon and climbing upwards, run in the interests of corporations, corrupt governments and runaway technology. Katsuhiro Otomo directed Akira from his own comic books, and Variety’s reviewer called it a remarkable technical achievement.
The Terminator (1984) pushed the timeline on. Its opening shows Los Angeles in 2029, a junkyard where the ground is a carpet of crushed skulls and the night sky burns with laser fire. An artificial intelligence called Skynet has started a nuclear war. Empire ranks it 14th of its 50 greatest science fiction films, and praises James Cameron for making it on a modest budget while weaving in a puzzle about time.
Brazil and the paperwork state
Terry Gilliam’s Brazil turned the totalitarian nightmare into comedy. Senses of Cinema reads it as Orwell’s dystopia played with the comic cynicism of Jacques Tati’s Playtime, a parable of corporate power. Slogans cover its walls, and its soundtrack keeps time with the clatter of typewriter keys. There is no natural horizon anywhere in it until a brief shot at the very end. For the BFI, the real villain is the faceless bureaucracy that defeats anyone who takes it on, a debt to Kafka’s The Trial.
How it travelled and changed
Orwell, again and again
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Orwell’s novel kept coming back, on radio, on television and in the cinema. NBC broadcast a radio version within months of the book, with David Niven as Winston Smith. The BBC’s 1954 television version was scripted by Nigel Kneale, fresh from his hit The Quatermass Experiment, and the BFI notes that some viewers rate it the stronger telling.
The 1956 film, directed by Michael Anderson with the American actor Edmond O’Brien as Smith, was made at the height of the second Red Scare. The BFI reports that the American Committee for Cultural Freedom, a CIA offshoot, steered the production. Michael Radford’s 1984 version was shot in the very months in which the novel is set, with John Hurt as Smith and Richard Burton as his interrogator O’Brien. Orwell’s widow, Sonia, sold the rights on one condition: no futuristic special effects. So Radford filmed among the ruins of Beckton Gas Works and Battersea Power Station.
Britain’s changing fears
British dystopias tracked the national mood. In the early 1960s the bomb dominated. In The Day the Earth Caught Fire (1961), Val Guest’s reporter discovers that nuclear tests have shifted the Earth’s axis, and London swelters. The film shot scenes at the Daily Express building on Fleet Street, mixing documentary footage with matte paintings and orange tinting. The Damned (1963) is a Hammer film directed by Joseph Losey, an American who moved to Britain after Hollywood blacklisted him. In it, three strangers stumble on radioactive children kept in a military bunker on the Weymouth coast.
By the early 1970s, the BFI says, the fear had shifted from nuclear disaster to ecological ruin. The same writer reads A Clockwork Orange as a film about the gap between rich and poor rather than between liberals and conservatives. Alex’s love of Beethoven and his Edwardian-style clothes show a boy who wants a higher place than society allows him.
Then the British strand went quiet. The BFI says British science fiction films were rare through the 1990s, and a new run of dystopias came only in the 2000s. Danny Boyle and Alex Garland made 28 Days Later (2002), which started a whole sub-cycle of pandemic films, and followed it with Sunshine (2007).
The Australian road
In Australia, Mad Max grew a tradition of its own. The BFI traces a strand of local films that mix dystopia and noir with cars and the country’s vast, empty interior. Some of its fears were shared abroad, such as the energy crisis of the 1970s and early 1980s, while the dread of the outback was purely Australian.
The strand began before Max. Peter Weir’s first feature, The Cars That Ate Paris (1974), is about a country town that lives by causing road accidents and stripping the wrecks. Its spiked Volkswagen, star of the original poster, has a cousin among the vehicles in Mad Max: Fury Road. Trenchard-Smith’s Dead-End Drive-In flopped on release and is now an Ozploitation classic. It came from a short story by the two-time Booker winner Peter Carey. The cast list links the eras too. Hugh Keays-Byrne played the villain Toe Cutter in the first Mad Max and returned as Immortan Joe in Fury Road.
Japan, and the network
Another BFI list, of films set in the near future, takes the genre into anime. Mamoru Oshii’s Ghost in the Shell (1995) is set in 2029, a world where people can add implants and robotic limbs to their bodies, and a hacker called the Puppet Master is targeting government officials. The BFI argues that most screen futures date as their year draws near, but this one, of humans merging with machines, still looks credible.
Then came The Matrix. In 1999, Lana and Lilly Wachowski, then barely known, made a $60m film about a hacker named Neo who learns that humanity is trapped in a computer simulation, and it was an instant hit. They borrowed from Hong Kong action cinema and from Kubrick’s 2001: A Space Odyssey, and used new digital effects to freeze characters in mid-air while the camera circled them. The Guardian’s writer says no film since Star Wars in 1977 had so quickly reset the look of mainstream movies. Empire’s review describes the real world behind the simulation as a ravaged dystopia run by artificial intelligence, with humans kept in tanks as batteries for the machines.
Brazil’s own battle
Gilliam’s Brazil found itself living its own plot. Universal Pictures financed it, and after a change of management the film drifted in the edit for close to a year. Senses of Cinema counts five cuts in circulation, from a 94-minute version edited by Universal’s chairman to Gilliam’s own 142 minutes. Jonathan Pryce, who played the clerk Sam Lowry, says people who stop him in the street now remember him from Game of Thrones, James Bond, or Brazil, and he thinks Brazil hit its audience so hard.
Why the future keeps catching up
The genre now has an odd problem: its future dates keep arriving. The BFI points out that 2019 used to be a big year for the future, because Blade Runner and Akira both chose it. Soylent Green sets its story in New York in 2022, a city of 40 million people. The real figure is nearer 8.6 million, but in other ways the BFI finds the film depressingly prescient.
Children of Men
The BBC calls Children of Men one of the most acclaimed films of the century. When BBC Culture polled 177 critics from around the world on the century’s greatest films, Alfonso Cuarón’s Children of Men came 13th. It is loosely based on PD James’s 1992 novel, and set in a Britain of 2027 where nobody can have children and refugees are locked in cages. The final stretch plays out in an internment camp at Bexhill-on-Sea, as Clive Owen’s civil servant tries to get Kee, the first woman to fall pregnant in 18 years, to safety.
Cuarón explained his first rule in a making-of documentary. The film had to be recognisable, and he and his team talked about being “the anti-Blade Runner”. He told the art department he wanted references to real life rather than invention. The opening bomb blast was shot on Fleet Street, with St Paul’s Cathedral in the distance. Writing ten years later, Nicholas Barber says it is still horribly believable, where a digital version would have aged.
Mad Max: Fury Road
George Miller returned to the wasteland in 2015 with Mad Max: Fury Road, and the BFI’s 2015 note on Australian road movies says it drew rave reviews around the world. The BBC poll placed it 19th among the century’s films. The BFI’s list of post-apocalyptic films asks whether it is the best action movie of the past 20 years, and singles out Margaret Sixel’s editing. It notes that Miller sidelines Tom Hardy’s Max in favour of Charlize Theron’s Imperator Furiosa, and argues that this pushes the film’s call for a fairer future to the limit.
The same BFI list finds room for Bong Joon-ho’s Snowpiercer. After a self-inflicted second ice age, the last survivors circle a frozen Earth on a single train, with the poor at the back and the rich at the front. When the have-nots revolt, they fight their way forward one carriage at a time.
The old films, renewed
Metropolis keeps coming back too. In 2010 The Guardian named it the second-best science fiction and fantasy film of all time. It noted that the shoot took two years and bankrupted its producers, with a budget close to $200m in today’s money and more than 30,000 extras. That same year a restored version returned to cinemas with its missing footage back in place. Even this version, The Guardian’s reviewer wrote, explains nothing. It only makes the film bigger, stranger and madder.
The 1984 edit by the disco producer Giorgio Moroder has had its own afterlife. At 83 minutes, the BFI calls it a travesty of Lang’s 150-minute vision. Moroder outbid David Bowie for the rights, and set the film to songs by Bonnie Tyler, Adam Ant and Freddie Mercury. Queen used clips from Metropolis in their video for Radio Ga Ga the same year. The BFI’s verdict is that in 1984, it was Lang rather than Orwell who shaped the era’s dreams of the future.
The red pill
The Matrix has had a stranger afterlife. Around 2012, a subreddit called TheRedPill turned its red pill into misogynist shorthand for “realising” that feminism was working against men. The Guardian’s writer regrets it, because the original films showed an open-minded society, with Neo and Trinity treating each other as equals. Lana Wachowski has supported reading The Matrix as a trans allegory.
Malcolm McDowell, who played Alex in A Clockwork Orange, says why that film lasts. Every new generation finds it again, he says, and the reason is not its violence, which looks tame now. It is the psychological violence, and the argument about a man’s freedom to choose.
Starter guide
Each film below has two trusted publications vouching for it. Start with Metropolis and work forwards.
- Metropolis (Fritz Lang, 1927). Empire calls it Lang’s masterpiece, and the Guardian says it became one of the landmarks of world cinema.
- Mad Max (George Miller, 1979). The Guardian calls it an Australian classic, and the BFI calls it one of Australia’s greatest celluloid exports.
- Blade Runner (Ridley Scott, 1982). Variety calls it one of the all-time science fiction classics, and Empire an initially misunderstood masterpiece.
- The Terminator (James Cameron, 1984). Empire places it among its 50 greatest science fiction films, and the Guardian names it, with its sequel, among the 25 best science fiction and fantasy films of all time.
- Brazil (Terry Gilliam, 1985). The Guardian names it among the 25 best science fiction and fantasy films of all time, and the BFI calls it Gilliam’s dystopian masterpiece.
- Akira (Katsuhiro Otomo, 1988). The BFI names it, with Blade Runner, among the most influential dystopian films ever made, and Empire calls it one of the greatest animated movies ever made.
- The Matrix (Lana and Lilly Wachowski, 1999). Empire calls it an era-defining tale, and the Guardian calls it a landmark film.
- Children of Men (Alfonso Cuarón, 2006). BBC Culture’s critics placed it 13th among the 21st century’s best films, and Empire includes it in its 50 greatest science fiction films.
- Mad Max: Fury Road (George Miller, 2015). It came 19th in the BBC’s poll of the century’s greatest films, and the Guardian calls it the greatest action film of the new millennium.
