10 Great Sci-Fi Movies With Terrible Concepts

Released earlier this year, Netflix’s blackly comic sci-fi horror The Platform has an undeniably effective, simple premise. It's also a premise whose metaphorical message is as unsubtle as a high school freshman's attempt to write for The Twilight Zone.

Set in a strange sort-of-prison, the film sees its hero wake up in a cell where he and his cellmate must fight over the meagre food given to them by a platform which works its slow, cyclical way down through this jail. There's enough food on the platform to feed every prisoner when it's at the top but, surprise surprise, the upper echelons take far too much. Thus everyone else is forced to fight to the death for their scraps.

It's about class and capital, folks, and that's it.

No explanation of how the platform works, who's running the show, or anything beyond a set up so simple that Black Mirror's own Charlie Brooker would greet it with "little on-the-nose, don't you think?"

In a conceit which makes Parasite's condemnation of capitalism look subtle, The Platform prides itself on how simplistic its central thesis is. But what sounds like an obnoxiously over-obvious metaphor is actually a biting bit of satire in this dark dystopian sci-fi horror.

Released at a time of unprecedented income inequality, the film's decision to forego backstory allows it to hit all the harder, and without any distracting world building, this blatant but brilliant film can make its statement all the more forcefully.