At first glance, the domed, future city of Logan’s Run appears to be a perfect, Utopian society. The city is sleek and clean. Everyone is young, healthy, sexy, and carefree. But the dark side is soon revealed as we realize that at the age of 30 citizens must voluntarily sacrifice their lives in a ritual called “carousel.”  

Those who don’t want to die at 30 become “Runners” who are hunted and eliminated by future cops called “Sandmen,” one of whom is our lead, Logan 5. Logan is tasked with going undercover as a Runner (hence the title) in an effort to discover where the Runners go when they escape the city. In classic cinema style, the hunter becomes the hunted, and Logan realizes that the future society he once fought to uphold is built on lies.  

Sure, the effects are a bit cheesy, and the story has more than a few plot holes, but the depiction of a society built on a lie feels unsettlingly real.

This Kafka-esque, pitch-black comedy is about a fascistic bureaucracy exercising mindlessly violent false arrests in the face of daily terrorist attacks, and the low-level paper-pusher, Sam Lowry, whose only escape of this hellish life is to retreat into fantasy and madness.  

Yeah, it’s dark. But it’s also weirdly funny and relentlessly satiric. If you’ve ever been given the run-around by a government agency, you’ll feel just how biting the satire is.  

The film’s future-imperfect production design has been copied but never equaled, and the way it usurps the cliché of the hero’s journey is stunningly bleak.

The silliness of this time-travel story is grounded in the very real-feeling concept that society’s least intelligent are the ones who reproduce in greatest numbers, creating a future of science-hating, fast-food-fueled, illiterate morons incapable of saving themselves from a human-created climate disaster.  

Thrust into this nightmare is Luke Wilson’s hilariously mis-named “Not Sure,” who’s just your average dumbass from our time, but in the future is the smartest man alive! The satire is so good as to be truly terrifying. How far away from President Camacho are we really?

Long before George Lucas’s THX1138, or V for Vendetta, or dozens of other imitators, there was George Orwell’s seminal dystopian novel from 1949. In this gloomy adaptation, John Hurt plays Winston Smith, who works at the Ministry of Truth rewriting history to serve the needs of the thought-controlling, surveillance-state known as Big Brother.  

Winston’s soul-crushing existence is given meaning when he falls in love with Julia, a free-thinking troublemaker who inspires him to feel alive for the first time. But their affair is illicit, and their defiance won’t be tolerated, so they are arrested and tortured.  

This one’s a tough watch, but it’s also a frighteningly honest depiction of what happens when we give up our freedoms for “security.”

In the future of 1997, in the face of skyrocketing violent crime, the entire island of Manhattan is turned into a maximum-security prison where society’s unwanted are dumped and forgotten. But when Air Force One crashes there and the president is abducted, it’s up to the recently arrested criminal Snake Plissken to rescue the president or die trying.  

This is the film that helped me define my own nascent, pre-teen sense of anti-authoritarianism, specifically when Snake Plissken responds to news of the president’s plight with a dry “President of what?”  

And what Plissken does in the film’s final seconds is a massive middle finger not only to the president, but to humanity in general. He’s the coolest. This movie is the coolest.

The “greenhouse effect” (mentioned for the first time on film?) has driven global warming into a perpetual state of drought leading to crop failures, food shortages, rationing, and famine.  

Class warfare rises. Society is on the brink of collapse. And Charlton Heston (a dystopian stalwart at this point) is an NYPD homicide detective investigating the murder of a food ration manufacturer.  

But the investigation is derailed by a conspiracy… and Chuck Heston can’t resist a conspiracy. The big reveal is probably the most well-known aspect of this film, but if you’ve managed to avoid spoilers for this long, I won’t be the one to blow it for you.

This one is not only the most hopeful film on this list, but it may be the best film of the 21^st century. Children of Men is set in a not-too-distant future in which a medical calamity has resulted in humanity losing the power to reproduce. Facing the complete extinction of the human race, governments clamp down. Borders are closed, travel is restricted, and massive refugee camps are erected.  

Our lead, Clive Owen, is tasked with escorting a miraculously pregnant young woman across checkpoints and exclusion zones to a pirate-like boat full of NGO doctors who may be able to help her and save humanity.  

The film’s depiction of a fascist state is all too real, but the struggle in this film isn’t against the system, it’s a personal struggle for humanity in the face of unbelievable pessimism, which is something we could all use right now.