These five dystopian movies might not be masterpieces, but they’re all better than — or at least as good as — The Giver.
This week’s Escape to the Movies is The Giver, because basically nothing else came out this week. It’s another dystopia movie, except maybe it’s closer to a “failed utopia,” but really it’s just one more “here’s a bad future that’s really maybe a metaphor for today.” Maybe its original book had the idea to do that with teenagers and youth social-hierarchy before Hunger Games etc. did, but otherwise this genre has existed for a long, long time.
Anyway: Spoiler for this week’s review: It’s not any good. Here’s five not-widely-seen dystopian movies that were better. Or at least more interesting.
HELL COMES TO FROGTOWN
It was hard to stand out amid the glut of post-apocalyptic Mad Max clones littering the 80s, but this one managed to: Pro-Wrestling legend “Rowdy” Roddy Piper is Sam Hell, a mercenary in a post-nuke wasteland tasked with rescuing a group of kidnapped virgins from Frogtown, a society of mutant humanoid amphibians. Why him? Because Sam Hell is one of the last fertile men on Earth, and the plan is for him to join with the rescued women in repopulating the human race.
Somewhat counter-intuitively, the means by which Hell is urged to complete his task involves a government-issued codpiece that will explode if he fails in his mission. Believe it or not, it’s actually not quite as much fun as it sounds, but it’s certainly unique and it did well enough to earn a sequel, Return to Frogtown, a few years later.
PRAYER OF THE ROLLERBOYS
It’s Los Angeles in a near-future where (according to news headlines at least) things have gotten so bad that the Israeli Defense Forces are in Northern Ireland (why?), Germany has purchased Poland and L.A. itself is engulfed in brutal racially-divided gang wars. The most dangerous gang? A rapidly-expanding pack of teenaged neo-fascists called The Rollerboys.
…because they do all their fighting and pillaging on roller-skates, you see.
Corey Haim stars as a hard-nosed street kid who gets drafted by the cops to infiltrate and inform on The Rollerboys, only to find himself swept up into the world of their charismatic leader — ultimately becoming the only hope of preventing The Rollerboys from enacting their plans to dominate the city… and then the world.
On roller-skates. Roller. Skates.
TANK GIRL
No one knew quite what to make of this dystopian sci-fi/action/comedy when it came out, which feels bizarre since everything from its punk-rock/riot-grrl trappings and comic-book visual trappings couldn’t scream “Make a cult-classic of me!!!” harder if they tried. Fortunately, over the last decade that’s started to happen.
Anway. It’s the future, and we’re running out of water. An evil corporation controls what H2O is left, and uses it to exert power over the poor and the innocent. They are opposed by Tank Girl (Lori Petty), who has a tank, and Jet Girl (Naomi Watts — no, really!) who… you get the idea. They unite with a desert-dwelling tribe of half-human/half-kangaroo hybrids led by Ice-T to battle cyborg supervillain Malcom McDowell. And now you want to see it.
DAYBREAKERS
Why don’t more people like this movie? This was so cool…
What’s the future this time? Pretty-much everyone on Earth is a vampire now. The old-fashioned sun-fearing/blood-sucker ones. They made it work for awhile, but now they’re running out of blood and can’t quite figure out a proper substitute; and that’s bad, because instead of killing them withdrawal turns them into savage bat-monsters. Ethan Hawke is a nominal good-guy vamp who falls in with a human resistance movement led by Willem Dafoe — an ex-vampire who accidentally cured himself and believes he can recreate the process. Give it a chance.
EQUILIBRIUM
Of any modern dystopian-scifi movie, Equilibrium is probably the one that cribs most liberally from The Giver (the book), effectively lifting the entire “emotion is outlawed” negative-utopia concept but with an emphasis on the loss of culture and art rather than mans-inhumanity-to-man moralizing. Here, a whole society has been nullified into conformity by daily medications that remove all feelings.
An elite police force, The Clerics, enforce not only the medicating but also the elimination of all remaining books, paintings, films, random pretty objects — anything that might be used to stimulate emotions among “sense offenders” — using a combination of high-powered weaponry and a firearm-based martial-art called “Gun-Kata,” which mixes kung-fu and handguns with mathematical movement-probability calculations to… alright, it just looks really badass.
Things turn around when, by chance, John Preston (Christian Bale, more-or-less auditioning for Batman) the most lethal of all the Clerics, misses his meds, rediscovers feelings and realizes that — hey! — he actually is pissed-off at The State for arresting and executing his sense-offending wife a few years back, after all. So he hooks up with The Resistance and opts to fight back.
