8 Dystopian Films That Might Come True
6. The Running Man
For a relentlessly trashy adaptation of a Stephen King novel, The Running Man has more to say about our present than The Last Emperor, Full Metal Jacket or any other “respectable” movie released in 1987.
According to this movie’s opening text crawl, 2017 will be marked by a global economic crash, riots, food shortages, all that fun stuff. Within eighteen months, Arnold Schwarzenegger will appear on the top rated TV show among disenfranchised voters except it’s not The Apprentice but The Running Man, where gladiators with names like Fireball, Subzero and Dynamo hunt and kill convicted felons.
The ringleader of this circus is Damon Killian (Richard Dawson), an angry white guy with bad hair with racial issues. Of the four contestants he selects, only one is a white American male (a Trekkie from the look of him, and likely a Democrat). The others are an African-American, a Latino woman and Arnie, so this is a movie all about how big business deliberately makes life difficult for ethnic minorities.