8 Dystopian Films That Might Come True
In 2017, the MenTel Corporation takes over.
Let no one say that Hollywood left us unprepared for how life would be in the early 21st Century. Like Leonardo Da Vinci, they left a series of tantalizing clues hidden in the popular culture that pointed the way to a series of uncomfortable events.
It’s worth noting that these clues weren’t hidden in Oscar winning pictures but in what used to be called B-movies, a term that’s been discarded by an industry that now only makes A-grade movies like Batman V Superman and Baywatch.
From the early 70s onwards, filmmakers laced their films with an acid social commentary that was usually overshadowed by the threadbare production values, ham acting and action sequences where the cameraman’s shadow was visible. That threw off the critics and academics who were busy praising the latest Oscar winners, but the rest of us knew that there was more to these films than met the eye.
We knew the apocalypse was coming because filmmakers like Paul Michael Glaser, Stuart Gordon and Sergio Martino said it was, and we knew when because they weren’t vague about the date. In the second decade of the 21st Century, they said, life was going to get very interesting indeed.
Here are eight movies that pointed that way, and shame on you if you missed any of them.
8. Barb Wire
Stealing its plot from Casablanca, Barb Wire casts Pamela Anderson in the Humphrey Bogart role as the bar owner attempting to smuggle a former flame out of the country. What makes the movie different? It’s set in 2017.
The villains in this glorified WWII story are the “Congressional Directorate”, and if you don’t get that they’re supposed to be modern day Nazis then their uniforms will remind you, as will their behaviour. In one sequence, a group of soldiers cackle while standing over a naked woman receiving electroshock treatment, as though they're appearing in Ilsa: She Wolf Of The S.S.
In an America torn apart by civil war, the only “civilized” outpost is Steel Harbor, where Pamela tends bar when she isn’t moonlighting as a bounty hunter who wears leather fetish gear.
The entire film is basically a Democrat’s idea of how a Trump presidency might play out: the liberals and ethnic minorities talk about escaping to Canada, the bad guys are all white nationalists and from the moment Pam “establishes her character” by being hosed down in slow motion, the casual sexism comes thick and fast.