Dystopia - vo.rs

Zardoz: Boorman's Folly and the Case for Watching It Anyway

Mon, 06 Oct 2025 12:00:00 +0000

The image that has followed Zardoz around for fifty years is Sean Connery in a red loincloth and thigh-high leather boots, a bandolier across his bare chest and a ponytail down his back, glowering out from beneath a Zapata moustache. It is a genuinely funny costume, and it has done the film a lasting disservice, because the still gets shared and the film goes unwatched. John Boorman made Zardoz in 1974, one film after Deliverance had turned him into a director studios would hand money to, and he spent that credit on the strangest, most self-serious science-fiction picture a major had bankrolled that decade. It flopped, it was mocked, and it has spent half a century as a punchline. I want to argue for it as a real film — imperfect, overreaching, sometimes ridiculous, and far more alive than most of the tidy dystopias that get respectful retrospectives.

Nine Sci-Fi Films That Saw the Surveillance Age Coming

Wed, 16 Apr 2025 13:00:00 +0000

Science fiction gets graded on its gadgets, which is unfair, because the genre’s real predictive gift has always been social rather than technical. The films below mostly missed the specific hardware — nobody drew the smartphone — and they nailed the thing that mattered far more: the feeling of being watched, filed, scored and sorted by systems too large to see the edges of. They understood that surveillance is a relationship before it is a technology, and that the watched change their own behaviour long before anyone acts on the data. Some are cold dystopias and some are intimate character studies, and every one of them was written when the surveillance we now take for granted was still a warning rather than a subscription. Here are nine that arrived early, in the order they were made, so you can watch the anxiety sharpen decade by decade. Spoiler-free throughout.

Gattaca: The Quiet Dystopia That Aged Forward

Fri, 07 Mar 2025 10:00:00 +0000

Most dystopias date badly because they overreach — the future arrives, checks the film against reality, and finds the flying cars missing. Gattaca did the opposite. Andrew Niccol’s 1997 debut imagined a near-future society that sorts human beings by their genome, and in the years since it has crept closer to the news rather than further from it. Polygenic embryo screening is a product you can buy. Prospective parents can select among their own fertilised embryos for lower disease risk. The word “designer baby” has moved from science fiction to the bioethics syllabus. Gattaca aged forward, and that alone would make it worth revisiting. That it is also a beautifully controlled, quietly devastating film is what makes it a small classic.

Escape From New York: Carpenter, Snake, and the Dystopia on a Budget

Wed, 10 Apr 2024 12:00:00 +0000

John Carpenter wrote Escape From New York in the mid-1970s, in the sour aftermath of Watergate, and could not get it made. Studios found it too bleak, too cynical, too convinced that the American future was a prison. It took the success of Halloween to give him the leverage, and even then he made it for around six million dollars — pocket change for a film that had to convincingly turn all of Manhattan into a maximum-security penal colony. That gap, between the scale of the vision and the poverty of the means, is the whole story of why Escape From New York (1981) works, and why every ambitious low-budget genre film since has quietly studied it.

Children of Men: The Long Take as Despair and Hope

Sun, 24 Mar 2024 10:00:00 +0000

Alfonso Cuarón’s Children of Men arrived in the autumn of 2006 and did indifferent box office, which now reads like a joke history has been slow to laugh at. Almost twenty years on it is quoted, storyboarded and stolen from constantly, and the phrase people reach for is always the same: the long takes. Everyone remembers the long takes. What they remember less clearly is why a film about the death of the future should feel, minute for minute, more alive than almost anything around it.