THE ROAD WARRIOR (1981)
Before he went all screwy on us (or, rather, before we discovered how screwy he’d apparently always been), Mel Gibson starred in The Road Warrior (a.k.a. Mad Max 2), just about the purest (and best) action film ever made. By the end of 1979’s Mad Max, things are already pretty bleak for Gibson’s titular character, an ex-cop whose family and best friend have all been killed by anarchic speed demon terrorists. But things are much worse in the sequel: society has broken down completely, people are killing and dying for petrol and for some reason everyone is required to wear football shoulder pads. Our protagonist has become a leather-clad man with no name, roaming the Outback with only a dog (who, like anyone else that gets too cozy with Gibson’s character, is doomed from the start). Eventually, Max’s need for fossil fuel forces him to choose between a bunch of dirty socialists living family-style in a fortified compound and Lord Humungus’ torture-loving, not-gay-at-all free market enthusiasts, who spread democracy with cool wrist-mounted crossbows. The film’s fuel-depleted landscape is a wonderland for plucky, self-sufficient mavericks who like to shoot things from helicopters (or, more specifically, gyro-copters), but like most totally cool, under-populated places where you don’t have to think about anyone but yourself, the pedal-to-the-metal, smash-and-grab wasteland freedom of The Road Warrior eventually gives way to the pesky forces of civilization (complete with charismatic black leader) in 1985’s Mad Max: Beyond Thunderdome.
LOST HORIZON (1973)
It’s a cliché to say that one man’s utopia is another man’s dystopia; the only way to make it interesting is to show us why. Lost Horizon, a 1973 remake of a 1937 classic, sets out to show us how even the best human intentions can make a Hell of Heaven, and it certainly succeeds, but not in the way it intends. Instead of illustrating its point by skillfully telling how a group of outsiders come to Shangri-La and spoil its utopian purity with their unchecked desires, it illustrates the concept of a dystopia by being a really, really shitty movie. It’s hard to know exactly what the worst thing about this stink-bomb of a musical is: is it the crappy songs, surely the worst things ever to have Burt Bacharach’s name attached? Is it the bad acting from bad actors, or the worse acting from good actors? Is it Charles Jarrott’s incompetent directing, Larry Kramer’s wildly stupid screenplay, or producer Ross Hunter’s ability to spend gobs of money on a movie that looks absolutely terrible? Yeah, those are all good candidates, but for our money, the worst part is the decision to make it a singing, dancing musical and then cast people in it – the corpselike Peter Finch, the ungulate Liv Ullman, the bombed-out-of-her-mind Sally Kellerman, and the completely lost George Kennedy – who have no apparent ability to dance or sing. Let’s not even get into Bobby Van. Long unavailable for home audiences, Lost Horizon is a so-bad-it’s-just-incredibly-bad classic that screams for a DVD release.
BLADE RUNNER (1982)
Movies have shown us a near infinite number of futuristic dystopias, but few of them have seemed as plausible as the Los Angeles of 2019 in Ridley Scott’s sci-fi masterpiece. Heavy enough is the basic plot, which is the stepping stone to all sorts of explorations on the nature of memory, the meaning of freedom, and what it is to be human: in the near future, big corporations provide humanity with perfect duplicates, android servants who do our dirty work so that we can have lives of luxury. What makes them not human, and what will happen if they decide that being human is just what they want, even if it means their own destruction? But beyond that, there are eerie convocations of class, race, and wealth that seem eerily relevant today: the future L.A. is populated with losers. Those with money and connections – save for the corporate masters who stay behind to manufacture the androids – have left earth for a cushy life in the outer space colonies, while the rabble remain behind. Scott’s masterful imagination of the futuristic city is stunningly evocative: an ethnic mélange, a collision of fashions and cultures, sex and violence around every corner, crooked cops and criminals alike speaking a curious language that is an amalgam of dozens of immigrant voices. The losers live by scrounging, while the winners sit in remote towers above them. The vision of a dystopic futuristic metropolis as imagined by Scott (and Philip K. Dick) was so compelling that Blade Runner later became a founding document of the cyberpunk movement.
SLACKER (1991)
Here's the thing about utopias: your ideal society may not look a whole hell of a lot like mine. Yours may resemble the Garden of Eden, perhaps with a chocolate river running through it, but mine probably looks a lot like Richard Linklater's no-budget 1991 debut Slacker. Here's a magical land full of interesting people, and you don't have to spend more than two minutes with any of them. It's a bohemian crazy quilt of coffee houses, bars, rock clubs and used book stores crammed with conspiracy literature, a laid-back enclave percolating with oddball creativity, where time has no meaning. When I first moved to Austin more than a dozen years ago, hardly a day went by that I didn't run into Ultimate Loser at the Continental Club or Been on the Moon Since the Fifties on the hike and bike trail, and it was almost – but not quite – as if I'd found myself living in the movie. (One of the characters nearly punched me in the eye for hitting on his girlfriend, which is a nice memory to have now, if not so much fun then.) Austin is still a cool place to live, all things considered, but it's changed so much since then that Slacker is almost a relic; you could make a drinking game out of spotting the locations that have since been supplanted by condos or Starbucks. Still, it's nice to know I can still visit that place any time I want just by cueing up the Slacker DVD.
V FOR VENDETTA (2005)
The fascist England of Alan Moore’s graphic novel, upon which the James McTeigue film was based, was a very British affair: tawdry, dirty, steeped in a very 1930s understanding of totalitarianism and suffused with an English sense of racial purity. The film did what such films always do – it took liberties. (Which is why Alan Moore refuses to have anything to do with film adaptations of his work.) Gone was a the filthy, hardscrabble Orwellian vision of a nearby dystopia, triggered by an unexplained nuclear exchange: in its place was a very modern authoritarian state, its parallels to Bush’s America as blaring and obvious as Moore’s references to Thatcher’s England were subtle and quiet. The great dictator is transformed from a hard, driven, religious man to a cartoonish supervillain appearing on giant screens as if he were a James Bond nemesis; his right-hand man is transformed from an advantage-taking careerist to a sneering Dick Cheney type; nuclear conflict becomes terrorism, blacks lose their status as the scapegoat of choice to Muslims; and, in a choice that painfully subverts the intent of the original, the state’s highest crime isn’t oppression, it’s deceit. In the absence of the fascist trappings, and the obvious references to modern society (completely with the recreation of state propaganda with talk-show blathering), the story loses much of its muscle. But the terrorist V remains a powerful symbol, and a memorable scene where police inspector Stephen Rea dispassionately explains, like a man who’s seen it happen a dozen times before, how state authority easily gets out of hand, is a compelling vision of the simple corruption of power.
Click Here For Part One, Part Two & Part Four
Contributors: Andrew Osborne, Leonard Pierce, Scott Von Doviak