10 Movie Dystopias To Make You Feel Better About The Current Political Hellscape
Sci-fi has taught us that things can always be worse.
Look, there's no way to sugar coat this: things are pretty bleak at the moment, politically speaking.
Regardless of nationality or political affiliation, there's a lot of crazy stuff happening that is making everyone feel a little jumpy. Will there be a war with North Korea? Will women have all their rights taken away? Will the UK be forced to leave Eurovision? Who knows - anything is possible at this point.
What's needed right now is a deep breath, a pause to calm down, and to remember that no matter how bad we have it, it could be worse. The imaginations of some of our most celebrated sci-fi movie writers have already birthed worse, in fact.
Dystopian films, on the whole, are made to reflect perceived societal ills taken to an exaggerated extreme for effect. They're an opportunity to posit what could happen if certain social or political problems are allowed to continue.
And for that reason, they're an incredibly interesting way to examine what were considered the hot button issues at any given point in time. They're also, generally speaking, horribly depressing. Unless, of course, you're looking to make yourself feel a little better about the world we live in right now, in which case they might be just the thing you need.
10. The Lobster
Of all the dystopian films on this film, this is by far the quirkiest. But that doesn't make it any less dark. Or, for that matter, aggressively unfair to those of us who are perennially single. Because in this universe, you're only allowed in society if you have a partner.
All those who are single (in the case of the main character, his wife left him) are sent to a hotel, where they are given a few short weeks to find the love of their life. Sounds easy, right? Of course, they are given the opportunity to hunt down rebel "loners" in the woods, which buys them more time at the hotel.
But if they spend the allotted time at the hotel and don't manage to find a mate, they get turned into an animal. They get to pick what animal they'd like to be turned into, though, so there's a bit of a silver lining to it, but it still seems like a bit of an extreme punishment for the crime of being single.