10 Movie Dystopias That Should've Happened By Now
4. Death Race 2000
“Once more, I give you what you want,” announces the American President, signalling the start of another Death Race.
A coast-to-coast competition where the name of the game is to score points by running over as many pedestrians as possible, Death Race is the Great American Sport of the 21st Century and its virtues are extolled on live television in a series of gushing commentaries. “Of course it’s violent. We love it violent, violent, violent! That’s the American way.”
The rebels who oppose the race are portrayed as 70s college liberals and led the white-haired Thomasina Paine, whose acts of sabotage are initially dismissed by the president as accidents, but when more and more drivers end up dead he blames the situation on the treacherous French and their European allies, who he thinks were also responsible for destroying the economy.
When we first meet the President he talks about how he single-handedly made the country “the greatest power in the known universe”, but when the flaws in his logic become apparent and he admits that not everything is perfect, it’s all the fault of the perfidious French who invented the word sabotage.