Just like a cyborg version of Jason Bourne, she doesn’t remember her past, but has supreme ass-kicking instincts, leading Ito to suspect some sinister military use in her past. Her brain is human, but the rest of her is artificial. Ito finds during his junk hunt and brings back to life. The story follows Alita (Rosa Salazar), whom Dr. That anime is barely an hour long, yet manages to pack in a sprawling cyberpunk universe with a deep and complex lore that supports whatever over-the-top tech fetish cyber action it throws at you. Based on the popular manga, Gunnm, Alita: Battle Angel mostly takes its visual cues and narrative structure from a 1993 anime adaptation by the same name. Considering the talent involved, it’s not surprising that the finished product is a frequently fun and kinetic, visually pleasing sci-fi/actioner, albeit one that doesn’t have a single new or fresh part embedded in it. Ito, director Robert Rodriguez and co-writer/co-producer James Cameron sift through the remnants of established sci-fi and cyberpunk properties in order to glue together a recognizable and cohesive narrative within the confines of its genre. What better way to start a film than with a metaphor about itself? Just like Dr. Mark RozemanĪlita: Battle Angel begins with Dyson Ito (Christoph Waltz), doctor to cyborgs, scavenging through a junkyard full of spare parts in order to find anything he can use. Still, in terms of sheer fun value, this film is quite the gem. Between the absurd production design and Paula Abdul-choreographed dance sequences, any attempted satire is all but buried in a thick layer of silly. Adapted loosely from a Stephen King novel of the same name, The Running Man depicts a future where everyone dresses like they’re at an ’80s-themed Halloween party and citizens regularly tune into a show where convicted criminals must fight to survive against both their fellow contestants and professional killers. While The Running Man lacks the sophistication and dynamic pacing of a certain other Schwarzenegger-starring/dystopian sci-fi/satire film, its entertainment value is nothing to sneer at. Here are the 50 best dystopian movies of all time: This may not be escapism, but as the increasing number of dystopian movies, novels and TV series prove, we remain captivated by stories of societies gone wrong and the struggle of individuals to overcome. That’s left a still very wide swath of cinema to consider, from sci-fi looks into the distant future to cautionary tales of a much more recognizable world in our present or even past. We’ve also eliminated post-apocalyptic films where society hasn’t been rebuilt to the point of a functioning government. For our purposes here, we’ve focused on Earth, eliminating films where the threat is from another planet. Dystopian societies are marked by mass suffering and great injustice, and we don’t always have to look for fiction to see examples. Not to be confused with post-apocalyptic films (though the two may overlap), dystopian films deal with a decidedly human threat from those in control. It’s natural for us to explore those what-if scenarios in film, something we’ve been doing since at least 1932 when Fritz Lang brought Metropolis to life. As oppressive regimes across the globe turn to technology to control their populaces-and we see our own government putting kids in cages and eroding privacies we’ve long taken for granted-we get a glimpse the terrifying possibilities of where we may be headed. That dystopian movies have become a genre all their own speaks to our fears of the future.
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