If utopia is the prospect of something wonderful, dystopia is its carbon copy or the decadent version of a society full of contradictions. Here are the most beautiful dystopian movies you should watch.
A distorted utopia, a damaged hope, an illusion of progress which, instead of improving ourselves, plunges us into a dark abyss.
The dystopia fails to be one thing because it has many faces, infinite drifts that respond to the many degenerations of which humanity discovers itself capable.
If utopia is the prospect of something wonderful, an idea so perfect that it is then unattainable, dystopia is its carbon copy or the decadent version of a society full of contradictions.
Here are the most beautiful dystopian movies you should watch.
1. Kin-dza-dza!
1986, Georgiy Daneliya
A dystopian tragicomedy. Kin-dza-dza! is a science fiction film, an anti-utopian comedy by Georgiy Daneliya. I do not want to spoil the plot for those who have never seen this film, but I give a little reference so as to understand what it is: Two Soviet uncles Vova and Ghedevan, Skripach meet a man who looks like a wanderer.
The man asks them for their planet number and shows a space-time travel device. The protagonists take him for mad, press the button of the device, and immediately find themselves in a sandy desert.
Kin Dza Dza is an atypical film, for themes, language, and forms of narration. The director has loaded with meaning some signs, attitudes, and objects that we will see to be almost protagonists of the movie; everything revolves around little things.
The bell and the matches will rise up to rise to the meaning of social condition and a means for salvation and the return to their own land.
The viewers of the film recognized a grotesque parody of the Soviet one, the Pluk cops are always asking for money. The people are rigidly divided into two castes, the Ciatlani, and the Pazacians, resembling the Communists and non-party members.
Director Georgiy Daneliya has always said in interviews that he was not meant to reflect the USSR, but rather to imagine what will happen if the world goes on. Daneliya jokes that many things have come true, such as the division into Pazachi and Ciatlani, or the language that is simplified more and more.
Kin-Dza-Dza quickly became a cult film among young people in the USSR. Certain words and expressions are still quoted today. This film is absolutely not to be missed, a unique genius.
2. Brazil
1985, Terry Gilliam
Visionary work where probably the best Terry Gilliam is at work who directs with dreamlike talent a story in the balance between Kafka and Orwell: the struggle of a humble employee against the colossal bureaucratic system that underlies human destinies and governs their lives, thoughts, wills.
In the cast also a surprising Robert De Niro, difficult to identify in the role of a dissident plumber and head of the anti-system Resistance.
Sam Lowry is an employee of the imposing Ministry of Information, often having dreams in which he hovers with angel wings to reach a girl.
Unfortunately, the reality is much more bitter: lost in the coils of a sprawling institution and pressed by a harpy mother who is a slave to cosmetic surgery, he finds himself a prisoner of an asphyxiated and oppressive system.
Due to an error, his office issues an arrest warrant for Archibald Buttle in place of Archibald Tuttle, a rebel plumber fighting the System.
While poor Buttle will be picked up by the police, Sam will take steps to correct the mistake until he makes contact with the Resistance through the infamous Tuutle. It will be for him the occasion of unexpected redemption.
The narrative of Brazil remains almost suspended and one gets the impression that reality can be swallowed up at any moment by the dream plane, almost a curtain of frost that frames a story whose contours we cannot distinguish.
A sort of comic book for images that recovers the sequential key almost by chance. And precisely because of this fairytale indecipherability it remains one of the most fascinating works of all time.
3. Gattaca
1997, Andrew Niccol
Gattaca – The door to the universe, a dystopian science fiction film directed in 1997 by Andrew Niccol and considered among the key titles of the artistic/literary movement known as biopunk.
This term encompasses the works in which biotechnology plays a fundamental role, and it is no coincidence that the story, which takes place in an unspecified time to come, is set in a society where naturally born children, with major diseases and physical deficiencies, are at a distinct disadvantage compared to their artificially programmed peers.
Vincent is the victim of this disparity and his life expectancy, due to heart problems, promises to be relatively short, preventing him from realizing his dream of becoming an astronaut.
The boy, however, finds a way to remedy the problem thanks to the collaboration, highly paid, of Jerome, a former Olympic champion who has now ended up in a wheelchair but still has a perfect genetic makeup.
Vincent thus transforms into Jerome and manages to enter the small elite of potential space explorers, but a murder risks revealing his deception.
Gattaca – The door of the universe hides within it philosophical and reflective ideas well implemented by a metaphorical narration from the very beginning, with the voice-over of the protagonist to introduce us into the background of this future in which dreams seem unattainable for the less fortunate: therefore, our pioneering courage, ready to do anything to reach the desired goal, assumes crucial importance.
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4. Stalker
1979, Andrei Tarkovsky
Stalker is simply one of the fundamental movies of the entire history of cinema, one of those works of art to bring to the famous desert island, one of the peaks of human genius to be sent inside a probe in the middle of space to show the aliens what we are capable of.
What is certain is that these aliens would perhaps take us too seriously, believing that the common homo sapiens possesses the abilities of Andrei Arsen’evič Tarkovskij, who belonged to our species but was a brilliant, unique element, not comparable to most of us.
Stalker is the odyssey of human feeling, it is the journey of Ulysses within a complex world like a neural network, as a dip in Ginsberg’s writing mixed with the poetics of the great mother Russia.
Where everything changes constantly, perhaps nothing really changes, where the scenario is the real protagonist of the story, where the man is bound as a pop-up, as an explorer without a compass at the mercy of the “Zone” which is the high, unique expression of stun power of a nature that dominates everything.
Three characters as sides of a scalene triangle made up of reason, heart, and mind, in which the sum of the parts is always different by changing the order of the addenda.
Man is an atom, an element of an infinite substrate that has come from nowhere to remind us that the world is itself a living being, it is time and space that becomes life.
The theme is travel, it is going where you shouldn’t, it is the natural attitude of man to discover by violating what you shouldn’t even get close to. The Stalker is the guide, the link, the thin thread that unites the Zone to humanity, he is the shaman of the context, the navigator of a place that has no cardinal points.
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