Not every sci-fi movie, especially a dystopian one, needs to come up with something completely original to be good. But some films are so influential you can’t watch later releases without spotting their ideas somewhere. Think futuristic cities ruled by corporations, governments that control every aspect of people’s lives, or characters who discover that reality isn’t quite what it seems. There are several like that, right? These concepts are almost like a formula at this point — but where did they come from?
And these similarities aren’t always a problem, but it’s hard not to make comparisons. The original films have had such a clear influence that some modern movies can feel like they’re just reusing the same ideas. Whether it’s their visuals, storytelling, or social commentary, here are 4 major dystopian features that made such a mark on cinema that they’re still shaping the genre today.
Dystopias can be scary in all kinds of ways, and in the case of Brazil, nobody needs to go around destroying cities or threatening the world to make people’s lives a living hell — all it takes is filling out the wrong form. The film follows Sam Lowry (Jonathan Pryce), a government employee living in an authoritarian society where bureaucracy controls practically everything, until an administrative error pulls him into an investigation that spirals completely out of control. So, what was already an absurd daily routine now is a nightmare of surveillance, incompetence, and abuse of power. That’s what sets the movie apart: the system doesn’t need to work properly to keep people under control. In fact, its inefficiency is part of the problem.
Now look at more modern sci-fi movies, and you’ll see just how much Brazil influenced films like Jupiter Ascending, Star Wars: The Last Jedi, and 12 Monkeys. In all of them, institutions become machines that grind people down in one way or another. Still, the legacy of the 1985 film goes beyond offices and employees blindly following rules, because it also shows how people can end up defending a dysfunctional system just because they’ve learned to obey it. That’s an idea that keeps popping up in stories about authoritarian governments and organizations that put their own procedures above any sense of humanity.
You can’t talk about sci-fi and dystopias without mentioning Metropolis, a movie from the ’20s that pretty much taught the genre a thing or two. The film imagines a futuristic city where the wealthy live in luxury while workers spend their days in inhumane conditions to keep everything running. And the story specifically follows Freder (Gustav Fröhlich), the son of the city’s powerful ruler, who discovers what workers are forced to endure and begins questioning the privileged world he grew up in. It might sound like a familiar premise, but that’s the point: this movie helped establish a formula that has stuck around for generations and is still being used today.
If you’ve watched Elysium, The Fifth Element, Akira, or even Batman, you can see exactly that. All these movies feature the idea that a monumental city can hide a deeply unequal social structure. And even the android (one of the film’s most famous images) became a recurring element in sci-fi, like C-3PO in Star Wars. Of course, not every futuristic city or story about robots is copying Metropolis outright, but the movie introduced so many elements that would become staples of dystopian fiction that it’s hard to deny its influence on later films. Whenever a story features an elite enjoying the benefits or technology while everyone else pays the price, it’s revisiting one of the central ideas this movie brought to the genre.
Few sci-fi films have had the staying power of The Matrix, which eventually expanded into a franchise. Still, nothing quite matches the original, which was basically a revolution around the turn of the millennium. Have you ever watched a movie where the protagonist finds out the entire world is a lie, starts seeing reality in a whole new way, and has to fight a gigantic system? Well, it all started with this story from the Wachowskis, which follows Thomas Anderson/Neo (Keanu Reeves), a programmer who discovers the reality he lives in is a simulation created by machines to keep humanity enslaved. So, he joins a group of rebels and learns to defy the rules of that world, leading to some of the most influential action sequences in cinema.
The movie’s impact can be seen in both its story and the way it’s told: the costumes, color palette, fight scenes, and camera movements that seemed to defy gravity have all been imitated by several productions. Equilibrium, for example, features an authoritarian regime, a main character who turns against the system, and stylized action scenes, while Ultraviolet goes for an equally over-the-top futuristic aesthetic. Others, like The Island and even the fan-favorite Inception (which is more of a spiritual successor), also share some of its DNA. The problem is that many films seem to have borrowed the easiest elements to replicate without understanding what made The Matrix so iconic.
There’s a reason so many movie versions of the future feel like different takes on the same place: crowded streets, constant rain, giant neon signs, pollution, or, sometimes, corporations that have more power than any government. Ridley Scott’s Blade Runner helped turn all these elements into the definitive look of a dystopian future. Set in a 2019 Los Angeles, it follows Rick Deckard (Harrison Ford), a former police officer tasked with hunting down replicants, artificial beings who are virtually indistinguishable from humans. The job seems straightforward enough until the investigation forces him to confront some questions about identity, mortality, and whether an artificial being has the right to exist.
Beyond that central idea, the movie built a world that many productions would try to recreate over the following decades. Have you seen Dark City, Strange Days, Johnny Mnemonic, Gattaca, or Ghost in the Shell? Some of these features have their own influences too, but Blade Runner is practically the foundation for all of them. What’s interesting is that it doesn’t portray its future as a society where technology simply went wrong — quite the opposite, actually. Technology has advanced considerably, but its benefits are concentrated in the hands of those who already hold power, while everyone else continues to live in miserable conditions. Interestingly, that’s also one of the things it has in common with Metropolis.
