The 49 Best Dystopian Movies of All Time (Paste)

That dystopian movies have become a genre all their own speaks to our fears of the future. As oppressive regimes across the globe turn to technology to control their populaces—and we see our own government putting kids in cages and eroding privacies we've long taken for granted—we get a glimpse the terrifying possibilities of where we may be headed. It's natural for us to explore those what-if scenarios in film, something we've been doing since at least 1932 when Fritz Lang brought Metropolis to life.Not to be confused with post-apocalyptic films (though the two may overlap), dystopian films deal with a decidedly human threat from those in control. Dystopian societies are marked by mass suffering and great injustice, and we don't always have to look for fiction to see examples. For our purposes here, we've focused on Earth, eliminating films where the threat is from another planet. We've also eliminated post-apocalyptic films where society hasn't been rebuilt to the point.