I can’t remember where I saw it, some website I can’t find now. I’m not sure if it was totally canon, but it was a pretty detailed timeline.
Year 1 was the formation of the Guild? Hmm, I was thinking it was tied to the Butlerian Jihad.
Waterworld’s been mentioned once already in this thread, but I’m suprised that no one’s mentoned the other lame post-apocolypse Kevin Costner film, the Postman. The only man in Hollywood who can take a fun genre like post-apoc and make not one boring film but two.
There’s Johnny Mnenomic, and the lesser known film New Rose Hotel, both from short stories by William Gibson.
Waterworld’s been mentioned once already in this thread, but I’m suprised that no one’s mentoned the other lame post-apocolypse Kevin Costner film, the Postman. The only man in Hollywood who can take a fun genre like post-apoc and make not one boring film but two.
There’s Johnny Mnenomic, and the lesser known film New Rose Hotel, both from short stories by William Gibson.
Westworld.
Starship Troopers.
Thanks Cervaise, for bringing in The Quiet Earth. I’m constantly turning that one on to friends who had never heard of it.
But the movie I first thought of was A Boy and His Dog. I don’t think Harlan Ellison writes happy stuff very often 
“The Last Chase” from c. 1980 concerns a future in which automobiles have been outlawed, thereby destroying our American way of life! At least, that’s how the protagonist sees it. A plague has wiped out much of the population, and the new society would be utopian if not for the trouble-making main character (Lee Majors), who wants to reinstate the private ownership of cars, especially for race car driving.
How about Resident Evil?
Logan’s Run anyone ? Plenty of free sex, but death at the age of 30 and compulsory spandex!
Red Dwarf was funny, but awfully bleak.
Ok Logan’s Run is under debate. All the sex and drugs you can handle for 30 yrs, for some people is a good life. The date for when Dune took place was in the intro of first movie. Remember when the emperor’s hot daughter was explaining the setting. But to add to the list: Red Planet, Titan A.E., Starship troopers, The Stand. Cecil damn it, now that I think of it the list is REALLY long. Ok a better question is what sci-fi movies DON’T have a bleak out look of the future?
The road
Every zombie movie ever made!
Hey, we are now living in the future–relative to this 12 year old thread. It’s not so bleak!
Subtle.
And I agree that Logans Run is subjective about being dystopian. Life is great for 30 years. And only a fringe element is even afraid of death since most everyone believes in renewal. It’s only when seen from the outside that one can notice all that they’re missing out on.
Almost all SF films are dystopias. It is easier to come up with dystopias than utopias – it takes less imagination, you know, the stuff SF writers are supposed to be gifted with. That’s why the greatest SF writers are generally the only ones to come up with believable utopias. Like the late Iain Banks, possibly THE greatest of the current crop of SF writers, whose Culture novels are an unabashed utopia.
Star Trek’s Federation is also a utopia, a post-scarcity society where money is meaningless.
Star Wars has utopian elements … Naboo seems pretty nice … but it seems to matter who you are (being a princess helps) and where you live (a slave on Tatooine, not so much) as to whether or not you live a good life. It’s more or less a medieval story set in outer space, in short. Couldn’t really call it a utopia or a dystopia.
The cheapness of post-nuclear/ecological collapse dystopias to film has made them VERY popular with filmmakers. All you need are some Southern California desert lands and a junkyard and a few junk cars, maybe an abandoned industrial park or facility, and you have your sets. Clothing, Salvation Army.
The earliest example would be “A Boy and His Dog.” Then there are the Roger Corman crapfests: Warlords, Aftershock, Terminal Virus, Wheels of Fire … the list is long, and all of it awful.
As has been suggested, far better to ask about utopian science fiction movies. A much, much shorter list, because almost all current and past SF movies are set in dystopias.
Interestingly, in WRITTEN science fiction which still remains conceptually well ahead of visual SF, there are a slew of good to great new writers who are writing at least SEMI-utopian SF based on Vernor Vinge’s singularity. Who knows, in another 20 or 30 years we might see their ideas showing up in movies.
It also would be interesting to ask about movies set in the future that are neither dystopian nor utopian but just the future.
Of the movies named in this thread, I would put Minority Report and Fifth Element in that group. Fifth Element is just “the future” albeit seen through goofy glasses. 
Minority Report IMHO avoids dystopia because:
(1) Pre-Crime is a test project or prototype, not yet a “done deal”. IMHO, if somehow you really could see the future, it would be bizarre to not use that information to prevent crime. :dubious: We have the crime of attempted murder on the books now, it’s just easier to prove in the world of Minority Report. :smack:
Admittedly, life imprisonment seems an excessive penalty, especially where they foresee manslaughter rather than murder. As to the “without trial” thing, do they actually say in the movie that there are no trials or hearings, or are viewers presuming there isn’t one because we’re only shown the arrest and the suspended-animation imprisonment? (I would say you’d still need a trial if only to hear any mitigating evidence and affirmative defenses.)
(2) the “Mr. Jones, here’s some merchandise you might be interested in buying!” thing doesn’t seem as egregious as some make it out to be. All sorts of websites already do this based on your prior activity, and IMHO there’s no privacy right not to be recognized by your face in public. :rolleyes:
I always thought Minority Report should have been more technology based than mystical “pre-cogs” with magic mutant powers. Sort of like a Person of Interest machine. Although I suspect that would have changed a couple of major plot points.
For bleak futures, **Oblivion **is about as bleak as you get. Tom Cruise as the “last man on Earth” roaming around a Manhattan covered with 800 feet of sludge, fixing drones under a busted-ass moon.
**Looper ** - For some reason in the future it’s easier to send people back in time in highly illegal time machines to kill them instead of just killing them and dissolving the bodies in lye (or lime? whatever they dissolve bodies in).
**Total Recall **(remake) - In the future, everyone will live in giant, distopian hives.
Dredd - This Megacity 1 makes the 90s Stallone version look like the Upper West Side.
Children of Men - A world that’s winding down because no one can have children anymore is pretty bleak.
Elysium - Other than the eponymous space station, the entire world looks like a South African shantytown.
In Time - Of all the clocks and watches counting down in this film, you will be looking at yours the most.
I always thought the draw toward Dystopian sci fi is to take present-day anxities and extrapolate them into the future. Whats neat is every generation has its own version of anxities- worlds under the heel of opressive theocracies, scarce resources, post nuclear apocalypses, etc.
How about the Terminator future? Most of the population has been wiped out by Skynet’s nuclear apocalypse. The people who are left are constantly hunted by Skynet’s killbots. Even with time travel, there’s this cynical realization that they can’t prevent Judgment Day (obviously anything they do will simply cause it to play out the way it will).
Does Cloud Atlas count? Seoul is sinking into the ocean. Everybody is forced to look asian. Soylent Green IS synthetic humans! Then some virus wipes everybody out except Tom Hanks on Hawaii. 
Looper’s future was weirdly half-assed. Its like they didn’t want to spend their budget on a lot of things to show that its the future, so they had the setting take place out in the sticks. Most of the movie takes place out in Kansas or somewhere. Even the FUTURE future in that movie didn’t seem terribly futuristic looking. The Star Trek reboot’s futuristic Iowa was the same way.
I guess little podunk one-horse towns out in the midwest don’t really change much over the centuries, aside from the ocassional time-travelling assasins and murderous killbots 
Does WALL-E count? Bleak at first then overwhelmingly hopeful,
D&R
The only difference between Wall-E and Idiocracy is the humans in Wall-E were intelligent enough to create spaceships and semi-reliable AI.
Idiocracy is the civilization of humans that got left behind.
I think they both take 1,000 years in the future too, it kind of fits!
How about the myriad versions of “the Last Man on Earth”? (TLMoE, The Omega Man, and I am Legend.) Pretty bleak to be, well, the last man on Earth. It is also interesting to see the same role interpreted by Vincent Price, Charlton Heston, and Will Smith, although they changed the name from the book in the first movie.