8 Dystopian Films That Might Come True
5. Fortress
You have to give 90s exploitation filmmakers their due – they weren’t fools. Directed by Stuart Re-Animator Gordon, Fortress takes place in 2017 during the “great takeover” of the United States by the MenTel Corporation.
“You will be programmed,” promises the trailer. “They will monitor your behaviour. They will control your thoughts. They will invade your dreams.”
In this dystopic wasteland, population control is rigorously enforced and anyone caught attempting to flee into Canada is sent to the Fortress, a private penitentiary run by Poe (Kurtwood Smith, who’s also the bad guy in Robocop), a standard-issue sadistic warden who’s ultimately revealed to be a cyborg. Because this is the (cough) future, he has a ton of cool gadgets including “strike clones”, networked robots armed with machine guns and flamethrowers.
Poe also has a sinister scheme for ensuring MenTel’s dominance in the future: all babies born during his watch are delivered by caesarean (which kills the mother) and ultimately transformed into cyborgs, making them the perfect audience for Transformers: The Last Knight.