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Dystopian movies - Too close for comfortDystopian movies come eerily close to the real life. One look at the world(s) portrayed in these movies (dystopian society) and you will understand the uneasy sensation many people, I for one, get when they watch flicks like Blade Runner, Soylent Green or Escape from New York. Personally what I find the most disconcerting about such movies is how often they extrapolate some current and very real social trends and popular ideas, and take them to their logical extreme, and, quite in sync with the general pessimistic tone of dystopia, reveal them as dehumanizing and oppressive. Surely nobody believes that the fixation with cloning as depicted in Gattaca, or the thought crime from Ninety Eighty-Four, or the emotion offense depicted in Equilibrium, or the male-centered theocracy in Handmaid's Tale, could ever be real. Or that one day an epidemic of infertility like the one which plagues mankind in Children of Men would ever take place in the real world? But ask yourselves, could all these dreadful things, freaky concepts and terrible political systems, not be real under certain conditions? And what would it take for such conditions to arise? And what if some of those conditions are already in place but it's just that we can't recognize them as such? Dependence on technology, social divisions, reliance on medications, sexual inequality, infringement of privacy, biological manipulation, political oppression and censorship as well as self-censorship, to name just a few staples of dystopia, have been around for quite a while, and all too often do these notions, and many more explored in dystopian movies, encroach on our everyday lives. On reflection, dystopian movies, far from showing just another imaginary place, feature a world rather close to the one we all live in. Too close for comfort.
Dystopian Society
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