According to the Wall Street Journal, the outage was extensive but also fairly shortlived:

Power was returned to some areas that were partially blacked out in as little as 15 minutes. In regions that were completely without electricity - which included Rio de Janeiro, Sao Paulo and Espirito Santo and Mato Grosso do Sul - it took as long as four hours.

Tuesday night's power outage took 28,800 megawatts out of the system, plunging several of the country's largest cities into darkness, the ONS said. That was more than 50% of available power generation available on the grid at the time.

The power outage affected 18 Brazilian states, starting at 0015 GMT (10:15 p.m. local time). The blackout caused traffic jams, closed metro stations and trapped people in elevators. Power was also briefly cut to Paraguay but was quickly restored.

But what's truly interesting is that there is no real explanation for how the grid went down so hard. Bad weather around Itabera, where there is a major transmission station, could have caused it. Some experts claimed lightning strikes caused the blackout, but the country's space agency says the strikes were too far from the transmission station to have affected it. Government representatives say they've closed the book on the case, even though it remains unsolved.

A previous blackout in Brazil was blamed on hackers, but turned out to be due to soot in insulators.

It's possible that the electrical grid infrastructure degrades in other nations, we can expect massive national blackouts to become the norm.

You have to admit the sight of Tom Waits as a sleazy, louche devil gets you kind of excited. And then there's the added visual evidence of Heath Ledger, Johnny Depp, Jude Law and Colin Farrell all playing the same person, which is something no other movie will ever attempt. Will the movie disappoint? You'll find out for yourself, when it opens Oct. 16.

[Cinemablend and Playlist]

Several episodes of Canal Livre featured Souza, a former police officer and politician, discovering the bodies of murdered drug lords in the jungles outside his home city of Manaus. You can see one such sequence in this clip, where Souza and his camera crew just happen to stumble on the still-smoking remains of a murdered man. Souza often ranted about problems with the police on his show, which is now off the air.

To prove the police's incompetence, Souza would air segments like these, saying that his TV crew was doing a better job finding dead bodies than the police.

Last year, his bodyguard was arrested for the murders of five men, whom he claimed Souza had ordered him to kill so that they could "discover" them on the show. Souza and his son were arrested, though Souza's status as a politician prevents him from being held in jail. Now the chief prosecutor of Amazonas, Brazil, has brought Souza up on drug trafficking charges too. It seems that he was also running a drug ring along with several other ex-police officers, and that the killings he ordered helped eliminate his competition in the world of drug selling, as well as on television.

This kind of scenario was predicted fairly accurately in the disburbing near-future movie Network, released in the 1970s, which is about a news show whose ratings go through the roof when their disillusioned anchor threatens to shoot himself on the air. To maintain their ratings, a craven TV executive (played by Faye Dunaway) arranges for the increasingly-deranged anchor to keep delivering his violent rants, until eventually he's murdered on air. At the same time, she uses her success with his show to jumpstart a reality program devoted to the activities of a terrorist group.

I can't wait for Survivor - the Wallace Souza Edition.

via ABC News

1. John Anderton, Minority Report

The Setup:

In the year 2054, John Anderton is the chief of Washington DC's elite precrime unit, which uses three psychics to predict when murders will occur and thus prevent them. Arrested for a murder he actually did sort of commit (which is way rarer than it sounds), Anderton is placed in suspended animation in the Precrime holding cells. The case seemingly closed, his longtime mentor Lamar Burgess goes to comfort Anderton's estranged wife Lara, but accidentally lets slip a crucial detail that suggests he knows far more than he is letting on.

Lara, finally believing John's claims of a deeper conspiracy, goes to free him from his cell. It's then full speed ahead to the film's conclusion, where Anderton confronts Burgess and places him in a no-win situation, where the only way to save his beloved Precrime will mean destroying it forever. Burgess kills himself rather than face such a prospect, and Precrime reforms itself, setting free everyone it was holding captive. But did Anderton ever actually get released from his cell, or was this all just a fantasy he created?

The Case For:

Somewhat unusually for a project rooted in a Philip K. Dick short story, Minority Report isn't particularly interested in the nature of reality, at least not in the way we're talking about here. Instead, most of the film concerns itself with debating predetermination versus free will, which is a different philosophical question from whether or not the events we experience are real. As such, it doesn't really make much thematic sense, and there's only the flimsiest of circumstantial evidence to suggest Anderton fantasized the whole thing.

Besides, this is Steven Spielberg we're talking about, not David Cronenberg (but more on him in a little bit). It just isn't really his style to reject the reality of his own films. If anything, Spielberg's fantasy and science fiction oeuvre is defined by accepting everything as real, no matter how preposterous.

The Case Against:

Still, that really is an impossibly easy ending. After spending a solid ninety minutes doing nothing but running and hiding from the implacable Precrime officers, the escaped John Anderton has no trouble leaving their facility or breaking into the impressively ritzy social event Burgess is at. Everything just falls into place a bit too neatly, considering pretty much nothing came easy for the first two-thirds of the film. Perhaps the end of Minority Report is a bit like the end of Adaptation - its sheer implausibility is the biggest clue that it isn't exactly happening the way you see it.

Chances That It Really Happened:

90%. A lot of recent Spielberg films have had somewhat weak conclusions, including Munich, War of the Worlds, and Indiana Jones and the Kingdom of the Crystal Skull, and you don't see anybody claiming those endings didn't happen. Well, plenty of people prefer to believe Kingdom of the Crystal Skull never happened at all, but that's a different issue.

2. Bender, Futurama

The Setup:

In the episode "Obsoletely Fabulous", Bender is sent back to the factory to receive an upgrade that will make him compatible with the new Robot 1-X. Unwilling to go through the painful, personality-altering upgrade, Bender goes on the run, eventually winding up on an island full of obsolete robots. Forsaking his own technological nature, Bender downgrades himself, replacing his metal parts with wood.

After launching an attack on civilization, Bender and his primitive cohorts end up at the Planet Express building, where they manage to do far more harm than even Bender really intended. All of his friends trapped in a raging inferno, a now useless Bender is forced to call upon the aid of Robot 1-X, finally making him realize the new robot has his uses. At that point, he snaps back to the factory, where he is informed the whole thing was just a hallucination, his robotic mind's way of coming to terms with and accepting Robot 1-X. This forces Bender to ask the philosophical question:

If that stuff wasn't real, how can I be sure anything is real? Is it not possible, nay probable, that my whole life is just a product of my or someone else's imagination?

It's a valid question - is any of Futurama real?

The Case For:

Absolutely, yes, all of it is real. By which I of course mean no, none of it is. Much as I'm sure it pains all of us to admit it, Futurama is just a TV show. So, technically speaking, I suppose none of it is actually real. But that's not what we're dealing with here. Much as Bender's line represents a great bit of meta humor, it isn't really meant to call into question whether the "actual" events of Futurama are any less real than any other TV show in the same way that, say, the "Normal Again" episode of Buffy the Vampire Slayer did. Am I the only one who's horribly confused by all of this? If nothing else, I need to find some more synonyms for "real."

The Case Against:

The end of the episode finds Bender walking back into the slums of New New York City, which he chooses to see as a beautiful meadow full of friendly woodland creatures. Beyond the fact that that sort of seems like an odd choice for Bender's perfect world, Bender's newfound belief that "reality is what you make of it" really does suggest that, on some metaphysical level, Futurama is all just some idle fantasy.

Chances That Futurama Really Happened:

90%. In the end, you've got to trust in the robot technician's brusque response to Bender's philosophical query: "No, get out. Next!" A man that coolly competent probably has a pretty good handle on the ways of the universe. Now, as to whether Leela ever really recovered from the space bee sting, well...that's another matter entirely.

3. Ed Straker, UFO

The Setup:

In, "Mindbender", one of the best episodes of this British cult classic about an elite but underfunded paramilitary force fighting mysterious aliens (which I've already waxed lyrical about in a previous post), SHADO recovers a bizarre artifact from the surface of the Moon. All those who touch it experience ultra-realistic hallucinations. After two men are killed because they started shooting at fellow SHADO personnel, thinking they were the enemy, Commander Ed Straker takes possession of the strange object.

It isn't long before Straker hallucinates as well, as a heated argument with General Henderson is interrupted with a director yelling, "Cut!" Utterly confused, Straker finds himself on a television set filming a TV show that looks an awful lot like UFO. He wanders around the studio, stumbling into a theater showing previously shot footage. Straker watches in horror as he sees some of the most traumatic moments of his life - all moments previously shown in the series itself - up on the screen as mere entertainment.

Unable to cope with this strange new world, Straker rushes back to his office set and desperately tries to make it return to normal. To his great relief, everything finally snaps back to normal, and he is once again Commander Ed Straker. But still...did he actually stumble upon reality, however briefly?

The Case For:

This is the same fundamental problem we faced when grappling with Futurama. What's the difference between a show acknowledging the fact that it's a TV show and a show suggesting everything we see is an illusion? I guess it's all a matter of degree, and the more and more elements from real life the show draws upon, the harder it is to dismiss the idea that the TV show is really just a TV show.

For instance, one of Straker's costars joins him in the theater to watch the raw footage. On UFO, the character was Colonel Paul Foster, but here he introduces himself as Mike. The actor who played Foster? Michael Billington. It's little details like this that suggest "Mindbender" really was trying to push Straker's hallucination as close to the actual production of UFO as it possibly could. At a certain point, doesn't the false version of reality get close enough that you might as well consider it the real thing?

The Case Against:

Then again, there are plenty of elements that don't match up with the actual behind the scenes of UFO. "Mindbender" would have been much more, well, mindbending if they had given the actor who played Ed Straker the same name as the man who really portrayed him. Considering that was Ed Bishop, they even could have had some somewhat amusing gags over the fact they shared the same first name.

Instead, Straker's actor name is Howard Beale, who was also an actor that, in his cover job as a movie executive, Straker had had to reprimand earlier in the episode. Much as the episode does some truly crazy, fourth wall shattering stuff for something made in 1971, there aren't nearly enough dualities for this to perfectly mirror the real making of the show, and as such it's hard not to conclude it is just a hallucination after all.

Chances That UFO Really Was All An Illusion:

15%. I'd be a lot more conflicted if they'd just been a little more meta. Although Straker's reaction to seeing his entirely life as a TV show really is heartbreaking.

4. The Red Dwarf crew, Red Dwarf

The Setup:

In the series five finale "Back to Reality", the crew find themselves under attack from a giant squid. Facing certain death, they suddenly awaken in a virtual reality gaming center. There, they are told they've spent the last four years playing a total immersion video game, and not playing it particularly well either. Returning to their miserable lives in a fascist state, the four friends aren't completely sure they can face their newfound existences and prepare to commit suicide together.

Luckily, they don't have to, as the ship's computer Holly is able to pull them back from the brink of despair. As it turns out, that squid that was attacking them had release a hallucinogenic toxin that caused them to experience the same hopeless fantasy as a group. The squid's effects disrupted, they are able to escape and resume their adventures. But is the world of Red Dwarf any less illusory than that of the fascist state?

The Case For:

The idea that they actually were playing a video game for four years doesn't really hold up to any serious scrutiny. Kryten alone is deeply problematic, as he didn't appear until the start of series two, when he looked and sounded vastly different (because a different actor played him), and it wasn't until the third series when he became a regular. I mean, I suppose the total immersion game could have had an entire part where one character plays housekeeper on a dead ship for the first year, especially if the players were doing a really terrible job, but it doesn't make a lot of sense.

Anyway, it's not even like UFO, which retained some slight ambiguity in that Straker didn't suddenly snap out his hallucination - he instead had to return to his office and actively choose to return. The Red Dwarf crew doesn't go back to the VR machines; indeed, we actually see them back in the real world for a few seconds before they realize where they are, as they continue to act like they're stuck in the fascist world. That's pretty conclusive visual evidence.

The Case Against:

Still, the possibility that Red Dwarf is just a slightly malfunctioning virtual reality simulation might be one way to explain all the massive, inexplicable changes to the show's continuity. For instance, the show quietly moved the characters' home century from the 21st to the 23rd, and Christine Kochanski somehow morphed from Lister's secret obsession (played by C.P. Grogan) to his ex-girlfriend (played by Chloe Arnett). Even if the despair squid simply created things that weren't there, it might well be possible that they simply returned to another layer of the game. After all, I've heard the levels of immersion involved are pretty total.

Chances That They Really Did Go Back To Reality:

65%. At a certain point not long after this episode, the show sort of stopped existing for me anyway.

5. Sam Lowry, Brazil

The Setup:

Mild-mannered bureaucrat Sam Lowry discovers love thanks to a clerical error, and his single-minded pursuit of what is quite literally the girl of his dreams makes him an unintentional enemy of the state. About to be tortured by his best friend Jack Lint (played by Michael Palin, in one of the all-time great underrated performances), Sam is suddenly rescued by domestic terrorist and freelance air conditioning repairman Harry Tuttle. Lowry and Tuttle proceed to blow up the Ministry of Information, but then things get a bit weird (to say the least). Sam ultimately escapes with his beloved Jill, and the two can now live happily ever after. But did any of it actually happen?

The Case For:

Completely depends on which version of Brazil you saw. Terry Gilliam's cinematic bad luck is the stuff of legend, and he faced studio interference on Brazil from the very start. Unwilling to accept Gilliam's bleak ending, Universal chairman Sid Sheinberg took his grim 142-minute version and cut it down to a breezy 94 minutes, complete with a happy ending where Sam does indeed go off to live in peace with Jill. This so-called "Love Conquers All" version appears on the Criterion release of Brazil, and was once shown in syndication on TV because its much shorter running length made it easier to market.

The Case Against:

Well, you see, the biggest thing missing from the "Love Conquers All" cut is a final scene between Jack Lint and the Deputy Minister of Information, Mr. Helpmann. The two look sadly at Sam, still strapped to the torture chair, and remark that he is "gone" - incurably insane. In other words, any legitimate version of Brazil ends with it completely clear that the happy ending is a product of Sam's broken mind. Which, considering all the crazy things that happen during his escape, is really the only plausible explanation anyway.

Chances That He Really Escaped:

5%, if only as a slight nod to the power of television syndication.

6. Allegra Geller and Ted Pikul, eXistenZ

The Setup:

Legendary game designer Allegra Geller has to go on the run with her de facto bodyguard Ted Pikul when an assassin shows up at a focus group for her new fully immersive masterpiece eXistenZ. The pair jump into an exponentially more bizarre adventure where it becomes impossible to know for certain what's in the real world and what's just the game. Finally, Geller realizes Pikul is the real assassin and kills him, only to find herself awaking as a member of the focus group for the actual game TranscendenZ, programmed by the actual legendary designer Yevgeny Nourish. The entire movie up to that point had all been a game, or so it would seem.

Allegra and Ted are seemingly content with their gaming experience, but then they pull Yevgeny aside to ask him whether he should pay for all the harm he has done and will do to the human race. They then shoot kill him and the head of the focus group in front of a stunned crowd of their fellow testers. They then prepare to kill another tester, who is forced to ask: "Hey, tell me the truth - are we still in the game?" So how about it? Did they ever make it back to reality?

The Case For:

Ooh boy. Let's see now. Well, there's the fact that a lot of the actors in the film only use their real accents in the final scene. That might be taken as a clue that the focus group for TranscendenZ is real, if only in the sense that the characters now actually sound like real people. Look, I honestly have no idea whether anything in eXistenZ is real or imaginary, but I do know one thing: Christopher Eccleston's American accent is the fakest thing in cinematic history.

The Case Against:

It just would seem to fundamentally go against director David Cronenberg's brutally ironic, unsparing sensibilities for the characters to ever escape the game. In fact, I think it's debatable whether there even is such a thing as "the real world" in eXistenZ, and even more debatable whether it makes much of a difference. Honestly, I'm pretty sure the question of whether they're in the real world or not is the least important part of eXistenZ.

And just so we're clear - yes, this argument has come down to a metaphysical quandary on the one hand and the ninth Doctor's terrible accent on the other. Just as it should be.

Chances That They Really Got Back To Reality:

I'm not sure. I guess you'd have to define reality first.

So far, Parnassus seems to be getting mixed reviews, with critics enjoying Gilliam's inventiveness (especially in figuring out how to switch in other actors for Ledger) but feeling like the film is mostly for an arthouse audience or for die-hard fans.

Says Screen Daily:

To anyone not sympathetic to Gilliam's flights of fantasy, Parnassus will reek of rambling self-indulgence but fans will welcome it as a return to what he does best.

The Hollywood Reporter says that Gilliam used great imagination and skill to replace Ledger, but the film doesn't rank with Gilliam's greatest work. And the HR offers a bit of a plot summary:

Filled with phantasmagorical images with the occasional echo of "Monty Python's Flying Circus," the picture involves a classic duel between the forces of imagination, led by Dr. Parnassus (Christopher Plummer), and the architect of fear and ignorance, known here as Mr. Nick (Tom Waits).

Andrew Garfield and Lily Cole provide youthful love interest, and Ledger is again the joker in the pack as a stranger who is not what he seems.

The setting is a horse-drawn carnival sideshow in modern London, an attraction in which Dr. Parnassus, who claims to be immortal, invites ticket buyers to enter a world of their own imagination by stepping through a large mirror. Once beyond it, faces change and fates vary, which is how Gilliam gets away with having Johnny Depp, Jude Law and Colin Farrell step into the Ledger role.

Ledger makes his entrance as a man being hanged from London's Blackfriar's Bridge with his arms tied at his back. Saved and named George by the members of Dr. Parnassus' troupe, he claims to remember nothing and joins the players. The doctor and Mr. Nick have a lifelong wager in which the soul of Dr. P's daughter (Cole) is the prize, and he suspects the devil has placed George there to make trouble. The rest of the film involves various plunges into the mirror's vast wonderland, with George changing physiognomy along the way.

Says Variety:

With Ledger onscreen more than might have been expected, the film possesses strong curiosity value bolstered by generally lively action and excellent visual effects, making for good commercial prospects in most markets.

IGN is more damning:

With clumsy dialogue, poor plotting and some downright terrible performances, The Imaginarium of Doctor Parnassus is a huge disappointment for any fan of Terry Gilliam's work.

The BBC is muted:

There's no doubt that the imaginary world he's created is awe-inspiring, but it's ultimately designed for an art house audience.

The critics at Cannes loved it, but most cinema-goers would need to see it more than once to start untangling the multiple themes.

As for Ledger, it feels like a post-script performance - he's only in the movie for a third of the time and even if he had lived to complete it, it wouldn't be chalked up as one of his most memorable films.

The Huffington Post gives it one and a half stars out of four:

This modest fantasy feels like a mishmash of the usual Terry Gilliam obsessions, but less so.

And the Guardian seems to sum up the buzz perfectly:

When Gilliam shoots off into his surreal wonderland, his film has a kind of helium-filled jollity and spectacle. The moments when Plummer's face looms hugely out of the hallucinatory landscape are great: a reminder of the old Python magic. But the film's convoluted curlicues are tiring, insisting too loudly on how "imaginative" everything is. And when it descends into the real world – Lucy out of the sky without diamonds, as it were – the film can frankly be a bit ho-hum, with some very broad acting from the bit-part crowd players. Gilliam's previous movie Tideland showed he still has teeth, and he bares them occasionally here. The dark side reveals itself, time and again, in the ruined, unsentimental locations in London. But this movie, though perfectly amiable, could be for fans only.

If anything, the retrospective nature of the 2:48 video is as depressing as it is comforting; it's one thing to say for Gilliam to say that the new movie "feels like the kind of films I made when I was younger," but the constant use of scenes from Brazil and The Adventures of Baron Munchausen throughout the piece - along with the generic trailer blurb about the movie taking you on a journey "beyond imagination" - also robs the viewer of any sense of newness or discovery. Or maybe I'm just being too picky. What do you think?

Teaser Trailer From Terry Gilliam’s THE IMAGINARIUM OF DOCTOR PARNASSUS! [Quickstop Entertainment]

Thanks John

The city was located in a region of the Amazon known as Upper Xingu (today in Brazil), which is currently inhabited by people of the Kuikoro tribe. Members of the Kuikoro helped identify the remains of the towns to scientists. In this satellite photo (below), the red lines are raised berms that would have served to elevate roads and plazas, while black lines show ditches that were used for defensive purposes.

Scientists have found about 28 ancient town sites in the region, each of which they estimate probably contained about 800-1000 in the "inner city" area, and about 1500 more in outlying farm areas. So each town probably had about 2500 people, making the region really quite dense and populous.

According to MSNBC:

Each village had a central plaza, the team reports. Larger communities could cover 150 acres (60 hectares) and included gates and secondary plazas. And each settlement had a formal road connected to the central plaza and oriented northeast to southwest, the direction of the summer solstice . . . . [Anthropology professor Mike] Heckenberger and his colleagues said the findings suggest future solutions for supporting the modern-day indigenous populations in Brazil's state of Mato Grosso and other regions of the Amazon — and demonstrate that the area can return to a "pristine" state even after centuries of human activity.

"Some of the practices that these folks hammered out may provide alternative forms of understanding how to do low-level sustainable development today," Heckenberg said.

No one knows for sure what happened to the city, but one of the more common theories is that its population was wiped out by diseases brought by European colonists about 500 years ago.

How the Amazon's Cities Worked [MSNBC]

Down in Rio, Brazil, the flying saucers look a little inverted but are still sleek and lovely.

Piatus snapped this shot.

In Spain, meanwhile, this glorious building looks just like a landed UFO, according to photographer Dags1974.

And of course people in Florida, United States, have their own special take on the UFO. Just crash it into a building.

Tony the Misfit took this one. Some things aren't entirely universal.

You could argue that most dystoipan movies are really false utopias, because the rulers of a dark, bleak dystopia (like, say, Brazil) still try to pretend that everything is perfect and wonderful. The difference is, most dystopias start out bleak and dark, and just get more horrid until the protagonist is forced to confront the darkness around him/her. But in the "false utopia" subcategory of dystopias, everything is bright and wonderful, and the main character is either getting some great drugs, or having lots of fun sex, or both in the case of Brave New World.

The "false utopia" genre, says Transparency Now,

shows humanity lost in false paradises of technology and simulation. In one subcategory, we see enclosed high-tech cities or habitations with apparently well-ordered societies full of people who are trapped by their dependence on automation and computers. They may also live decadent lifestyles that serve to distract them from the truth of their circumstances.

Here's a brief and cheerful history of fake utopias:

1909. "The Machine Stops" by E.M. Forster. Forster's reaction to some of H.G. Wells' more optimistic fiction. In the distant future, humans live underground, each in a separate "cell," with all of his or her needs provided for by the all-powerful Machine. Human culture stagnates, and people wrongly believe they can't survive on the surface of the Earth without protection. Over time, people start to worship the Machine like a god, forgetting they made it. And then eventually the Machine starts to break down.

1932. Brave New World by Aldous Huxley. It's 2540, and everybody's drugged up to the gills on Soma, a sort of anti-depressant/psychotropic, and people can learn in their sleep. There's lots and lots of casual sex and orgies, and people chanting "orgy porgy" while having orgies. It's awesome. Oh, and people are incubated artificially instead of being born "naturally." The lower classes are engineered to be less intelligent and curious than the upper classes.

1956. The City And The Stars by Arthur C. Clarke. It's a billion years in the future, and humans have mostly abandoned Earth to go off and create super-ultra-awesome minds in space. In the domed city of Diaspar, people lead perfect lives, governed by the Central Computer. When they die, the Computer stores their memories and grows new bodies for them, making them nearly immortal. But then it turns out humans have been lied to about why they have to stay on Earth.

1971. The Futurological Congress by Stanislaw Lem. Ijon Tichy goes to sleep (or does he?) and wakes up in the trippy year of 2039, an utopian era without money or want. Everybody's mood is kept carefully controlled using drugs. Many people have pointed out the similarities of this drug-induced utopia to The Matrix: At one point, Tichy's girlfriend offers him a choice between two pills: The black pill will make him forget their relationship, the white pill will make him commit more deeply.

1976. Logan's Run, the movie based on the 1969 novel by William F. Nolan and George Clayton Johnson. Everything is perfect in the domed city, with all the casual sex and meaningless hedonism you could ever want. Machines provide for all of your needs, but there's one drawback — when you turn 30, you have to die.

1994. The Giver by Lois Lowry. In this award-winning young-adult novel, it's a perfect world: bad feelings and conflict have been eliminated, thanks to perfect communication and drugs. (It's always drugs.) People get around by bicycle, and there are very few cars or airplanes. Romantic love and sexual desire (called "stirrings") are illegal, and are suppressed via medication. Instead, couples are matched up based on compatibility and can adopt up to two children from "birth mothers": one boy and one girl. Here's a Christian review warning against this book based on a misconception that it's actually utopian.

1998. The Truman Show. Truman lives in a lovely small town, surrounded by nice people, with possibly the only job in the insurance industry that doesn't totally suck. The only problem is, he can never leave town, and he's kept scared of the ocean by a fake story about his father drowning. He doesn't realize that everything in his world is a lie, and he's really one of the Pussycat Dolls.

2002. Equilibrium. I hesitated to include this movie, because it's not much of a utopia. It's sort of bleak and nasty, and Christian Bale will do gun-aerobics in your face. But it does have many of the hallmarks, including people being drugged into flat affect-hood.

2005. The Island. Ewan McGregor lives in a utopian community where everything is perfect, and all of his choices are made for him. As usual in these types of stories, everybody's told that the rest of the world is uninhabitable due to some kind of toxic disaster. Everybody yearns to win the "Lottery" and go to "The Island," a tropical paradise — but it turns out The Island is made of people. Sort of.

Here are the giant water bottle's many regular-sized friends (its mini-mes, if you will): And here it is close up: Now, from a distance: Photos via MAURICIO LIMA/AFP/Getty Images.

THX-1138. Totally hairless dude? Check. Drugs keep him asexual and out of it? Check. Total childlike submission to authority, at least at first? Double check. Somewhere there's an adult baby touching himself to this movie right now.

Brazil. Jonathan Pryce wanders through most of the movie with a lost-little-boy look on his face. And when he dreams about fighting back, it's as a childish fantasy sword-hero who isn't all that effective. It takes Kim Greist and Robert DeNiro kicking his ass to get him to start taking matters into his own hands. The film presents his boyishness as lovable, even though it's a direct result of the oppressive system he lives in.

The Truman Show. The film audience loves Truman for much the same reason as his fictional viewers. His cute overgrown boy grin, his cutesy sayings. People watch him sleep, like a puppy. Everyone around him tries to keep him scared to go too far away from home, and his job as an insurance agent is all about clinging to security. He's a big kid.

The Island. Okay. Ewan McGregor and his fellow agnates wear pajamas. A "nannyish" computer scans their urine and monitors their diet. Black-clad guards rush over if male and female clones spend too much time touching each other. They're taught to fear the outside world, and they do as they're told, waiting to go to a storybook paradise called The Island. Basically, it's THX-1138 with hair.

Of course, all of these films end with our hero growing up and casting off the corporate/state apron-strings. Otherwise, they'd make for pretty dull viewing. But first, they linger lovingly over the spectacle of their heroes turned into kids, because all that regression provides an escapist thrill for us, the audience. And why not? Isn't that what's so seductive about authoritarian cultures in the first place?

• 
  
• A Clockwork Orange: Malcolm McDowell was given an experimental injection and forced to watch images of violence and sex until the mixture made him barf. Can you imagine throwing up whenever you watched porn? That's the very worst torture of all.
• 
  
• Star Trek II: The Wrath of Khan: Khan takes an earwig and drops it inside of Chekov's helmet, where it slowly crawls into his ear, spitting some kind of bloody acid as it goes. Then it wraps itself around his cerebral cortex and makes him Khan's bitch. That scene made me sleep with earplugs for about six months when I was a kid, and it still creeps me out.
• 
  
• Doctor Who — "Vengeance on Varos": Colin Baker (during his chubby years) visits Varos, a planet where people are shown public scenes of torture and execution for entertainment. Sort of like American Idol, with a sadistic Ryan Seacrest. The Doctor was a bit of a dick in this episode, getting a lot of people killed and leaving the torture machines intact when he left. Nice guy.
• 
  
• The Empire Strikes Back: Darth Vader takes Han Solo into his private torture room on Bespin and lowers him onto a really nasty looking torture rack. As Han's screams echo throughout Cloud City, someone had the bright idea to turn this into a fucking action figure! "Here Timmy, enjoy torturing Harrison Ford!" Genius.
• 
  
• Brazil: Jonathan Pryce gets tortured by his former friend Michael Palin wearing a hideous babyface mask in Terry Gilliam's dark vision of the future. In fact, there's a whole branch of the Ministry of Information called "information retrieval" to get jobs like this done, just like George Bush's CIA does. Everything becomes unraveled when a typo gets the wrong man killed. No spellcheck for you.
• 
  
• Cube: Seven strangers wake up inside a giant cube, where each new room contains a deadly trap that they have to figure out. In the first three minutes of the movie, a guy gets chopped into square pieces by a swinging razor-bladed gate. So you know you're in for something really special. Plus, there's high-level math involved in figuring out the puzzle, which is a special kind of torture right there. Damn prime numbers.
• 
  
• Star Trek: The Next Generation — "Chain of Command": Patrick Stewart should have walked away with a special Oscar for over-the-top acting in this episode, but I still love the damn thing. Picard is kidnapped and brainwashed over and over by a Cardassian agent, played by the excellently evil David Warner. Warner keeps asking how many lights are on the wall, and although Picard is promised comfort and luxury if he says there are five lights, he never breaks. At the end of the episode, as he stumbles out of the torture room, he turns and shouts, "THERE. ARE. FOUR. LIGHTS!" Just watch the damn thing below, it still gives me goosebumps.

• 
  

28 Days Later
A virus called Rage spreads rapidly through England, turning nearly everyone into zombie-like creatures who eat human flesh. A small band of uninfected humans escape London, only to find themselves in an even worse situation when they encounter a military unit whose madness has nothing to do with the virus. Ends on an ambiguously dark note. You won't be reaching for the cyanide capsules, but you may not be able to sleep.

Invasion of the Body Snatchers (1978 version)
This dark remake of the 1950s communist-scare story takes place in San Francisco and stars Donald Sutherland as a Sensitive New Age guy who discovers all his buddies have become pod people in their sleep. Made very soon after the Watergate scandal, the movie is a satisfying homage to conspiracy paranoia. The ending will make you want to never sleep again.

The Quiet Earth
This New Zealand indie is about a guy who wakes up one morning to discover he's the last guy on Earth . . . until he meets two other survivors. Sometimes having people around can be worse than being the only guy on the planet. Especially when the fabric of space-time keeps getting shredded. The ending is one of the most beautiful and frightening things I've ever seen.

Brazil
Terry Gilliam's mid-1980s dystopian masterwork holds up beautifully, and people a century from now will still be watching this sad tale of a dreamy bureaucrat who gets mixed up with political forces he doesn't understand. Set in a gloomy, fascist nation forever at war with nebulously-defined terrorists, Brazil is about how a little guy who dreams big can fight the system. But the ending — which Gilliam fought the studios tooth and nail to retain — will make you cry, rip your hair out, and question whether there is any hope left in the world.

Night of the Living Dead
There have been sequels aplenty, but none hold a candle to this 1969 speculative classic in which the recently-dead suddenly start walking around eating the living. Though it plays with horror themes, this black-and-white movie has almost a documentary feeling. There's nothing supernatural about government officials trying to explain and suppress information about the risen dead. When a group of strangers get stranded in a zombie-beseiged house, they have to work together to fend off the hordes of dead people. But director George Romero wants to be sure you know that heroism never pays off in late-60s America. The ending will make you want to chew people's arms off just like a zombie would.

Famous names: Terry Gilliam, Jonathan Pryce, Michael Palin, Robert DeNiro

Crunchy goodness: 5

Design breakthrough: Directed by famed Monty Python animator Terry Gilliam, who has made a career out of dark, visually-arresting films, Brazil masterfully contrasts Sam's trippy, gorgeous dreamscapes with the claustrophobic, information-industrial urban space where he lives.

Stunt casting: Gilliam's Python pal Michael Palin plays a twitchy, unctuous torturer.

Spinoffs: 12 Monkeys, another Gilliam film, appears to take place in an even darker version of the world he invented for Brazil.

Brazil Frequently Asked Questions