Robots, revolution, blood: why we love a good dystopia on film

When Chaos Walking, Doug Liman’s $125 million adaptation of the young-adult dystopian thriller by Patrick Ness, receives its long-delayed global release, it’ll pose a conundrum. Ness’s story takes place on a decimated planet – maybe it was once Earth – on which only men have survived.

Daisy Ridley is the mysterious Viola, who crash-lands in this dangerous landscape and is protected by a young hero, Todd (Tom Holland). But the question is: even in countries where cinemas are permitted to open, will the public appetite for watching this pair struggle through a ravaged world have been depleted by the pandemic, or perversely whetted?

Cinema’s imagined futures have never, in truth, been especially cheery. Show me some philosophically noble utopia on screen and I’ll quickly point to the rot beneath – as will the film, if it has any hope of keeping our attention. Since as far back as the silent era, the technology of filmmaking has raced ahead, projecting ideas of the future to flaunt the capabilities of the medium itself, while also preaching admonitory lessons. It’s somewhere in this seemingly contradictory impulse that the genre of dystopian film tends to land.

In 19th-century fiction, Jules Verne and HG Wells laid down precepts about the impending dangers of totalitarianism, hinting at misanthropic visions of a machine society. But the heyday of the “dystopian novel” as we know it best belongs to Brave New World (1932), Nineteen Eighty-Four (1949), Fahrenheit 451 (1953) and A Clockwork Orange (1962). The list of science-fiction writers who would flourish in this tradition is long: John Wyndham, Isaac Asimov, Philip K Dick and Ursula Le Guin are among the most famous.

And yet, cinema’s obsession with nightmarish industrial futures began well before this, as we see from Fritz Lang’s Metropolis (1927). Imagining the revolt of a vast underclass of workers against the technocratic elite, this masterpiece of German Expressionism flagged the potential of a dystopian allegory to be read in different ways. While Lang was influenced by the writings of Marx and Engels, screenwriter Thea von Harbou would join the Nazis, and the film fascinated Goebbels and Hitler himself.

If we’re weighing up visions of slavery, it’s not such a huge leap from Metropolis to The Matrix (1999), which replaced our heartless overlords with alien robots, feasting on our brains for energy until a revolution can undo the shackles. But The Matrix and its sequels thrust the paradoxes of the genre to the fore.

Technophobia is meant to be its tenet, but what made a splash was obviously its hardware: the frazzling gleam of the CG effects, the “bullet time” gunplay. It made this vaunted terror of a digital future look a little too cool for its own good.

This is why, just six years ago, Mad Max: Fury Road took everyone aback. The vision of the future was suddenly grubby again, erotically charged, desperately human. An astonishing amount of George Miller’s film was shot using practical techniques, preserving a tactile through-line with the earlier instalments in the series (1979, 1981, 1985), whose painstaking stunt-work it revived.

Fittingly, it looks like it took extraordinary human effort to make the thing – untold man-hours tumbling into actual dirt, rather than generating 100 Hugo Weavings at a console. It unleashed a primordial excitement that audiences had all but forgotten.

What does any self-respecting dystopia need, in order to qualify as such? The hallmarks are environmental ruin, loss of individualism, and strict totalitarian and/or technological control. If we’re dealing only with the first element, the film’s setting is more strictly “post-apocalyptic” (The Road, A Quiet Place). Orwellian tropes of brainwashing and the rule of fear have often percolated, especially in the likes of Terry Gilliam’s Brazil (1985), which was originally entitled 1984½.

The Eighties were a particularly fertile period for big-budget dystopian cinema, which brought into the mainstream concepts of “future noir” or “tech noir”. The second term was even used as the name of the cyberpunk nightclub in James Cameron’s The Terminator (1984). That film and Ridley Scott’s Blade Runner (1982) filled the future with criminality and shadows, looking into the noir history of Los Angeles to imagine an all-but-lawless terrain ruled by tech corporations.

But what’s at stake in almost every dystopia, with remarkable consistency, is human consciousness in the age of artificial intelligence. Clinging onto our very humanity is the fight that gives these films a pulse, and technology is rarely our ally in that regard. Protagonists are either jacked into some neural network that fabricates their reality (The Matrix), or they’re androids that have been tricked into dreaming like humans (Blade Runner) or even loving like humans (AI: Artificial Intelligence).

Some are prisoners of a destiny from which time-travel cannot save them (The Terminator), or are convicted for crimes they haven’t even committed yet (Minority Report). No wonder that actual, raw, lived experience is such a commodity in the likes of Kathryn Bigelow’s Strange Days (1995), where it gets bought and sold as discs on the black market, downloaded directly from the cerebral cortex. The embers of humanity need urgently protecting in this genre from the forces of dehumanisation that would stamp them out – as Orwell’s image of the future, a boot stamping on a human face, foretold.

In young adult franchises such as The Hunger Games, The Maze Runner, Divergent and now Chaos Walking, this is where teen-rebel heroics come into the equation. An older generation is either the source of the catastrophe or has long since submitted to the yoke of despotism. Youth, and hope, are stifled. Chaos Walking is hoping that its pairing of Spider-Man and Rey from Star Wars will persuade audiences to invest once again in the fightback.

But the film will live or die on how well it holds up imaginatively – especially given that much of the target audience will only be able to watch it from behind their own set of bars, before lockdown’s fully over.

Viewers may well feel it’s too soon to confront this kind of dystopian gloom. But, in the long run, the genre is here to stay, bound to shake us up with ever-bolder ideas in the wake of Covid, and reminding us that, at any moment, our puny existence could be simply snuffed out.

Chaos Walking will be released in the UK in the coming months