Yesterday's dystopian thrillers about crime-fighting are tomorrow's perfectly rational solutions to the crime problem. At least, that's what a bunch of criminologists told The Atlantic.

In The Purge, a suburban family is put through hell because right wingers came up with a plan to eliminate the poor and the sick. And we all come face to face with how broken the American dream really is. Yadda yadda. Basically, it's like this year's Atlas Shrugged or Now: a clunky and implausible political screed in…

Dystopias aren't meant to be plausible. They're a reflection of our darkest nature, writ large. Plus we can all think of real-life societies that would seem like ridiculous dystopias if you put them in fiction. But what's the most contrived or implausible dystopia ever invented?

Everybody knows that dystopias have the best fashions and the coolest designs. Whether it's the stark paleness of THX-1138, the totalitarian chic of Nineteen Eighty Four, the orgy cool of Brave New World or the priests-on-prozac aesthetic of Equilibrium... dystopias are always fashionable. So what's the most stylish…

Now that you've seen the first stunning trailer for Neill Blomkamp's Elysium and picked apart the screencaps, you can start to see a few similarites to Blomkamp's first movie, District 9. The politics, the cool gear, and the massive object floating in the sky. We caught up with Blomkamp a while ago, and he told us the…

Everybody loves dystopias right now. And we're in the middle of a huge boom in movies about sexy young people who are struggling to figure out their identities and which hottie they want to boink. Both of these trends are inherently absurd, so it's a pleasure to encounter a movie that embraces the absurdity as joyously …

This fake trailer for a conservative science-fiction movie just premiered at CPAC, the big right-wing confab, and... it's a thing of true beauty. It contains more awesome scenes of socialist oppression, and a few heroic people fighting back, than both Atlas Shrugged movies. And the acting is truly epic as well,…

Some of the coolest science fiction movies of all time are love stories — Eternal Sunshine, Brazil, and plenty of others. Combining big ideas with an epic passion just makes sense. But why do so many films fail to pull off this combination? Watching the new movie Upside Down, which fails so spectacularly as a love…

Right now, everywhere you go in downtown San Francisco, you'll see this poster. Full of pills, with an ominous message about the future, the poster invites you to learn about something called THX-1138. But what kind of medicine is this? I can only imagine the kind of conversations this is sparking around town.

There is something vertiginous about a great British dystopia. Perhaps it's just that extra layer of distance between Americans and Brits. Perhaps it's just being culturally closer to seminal works like George Orwell's 1984 or, more recently, Alan Moore's V for Vendetta. Or perhaps it has something to do with…