I'm not the only person who noticed this: The Guardian recently pointed out that every modern dystopian story more or less originates in climate change. Elysium, Snowpiercer, Interstellar, and Maze Runner are all scenarios in which the spark of destitution is weather-related. In almost all of these cases, humanity is first forced to live amongst its own fumes in a bunkered society before forming an oppression-tastic government as a side effect -- much like how robots and war created the fictional dystopias of the pre-2000s. "A bunch of dust" is the new Skynet.

The Hunger Games, specifically, takes place in the nation of Panem ... which, in case you never noticed, is merely the US with a shitload more beaches.

Maria Rizzoni
Canada remains unchanged, according to the text in this map.

In both Logan's Run and THX 1138, the heroes emerge from their totalitarian bio-cage to find a perfectly habitable world outside -- all because yesterday's writers never envisioned a wasteland so stupid that our proclivities toward freight shipping and plastic bottles would mark our demise. That's why, even when we did acknowledge our negative effect on the environment, we never focused on it as a catalyst. The world of Blade Runner might be smog-filled and nearly bereft of non-synthetic animals, but the real concern was getting your head twisted off by Daryl Hannah's robo-legs. The irony now is that instead of enslaving us, modern fictional robots, like Interstellar's TARS, are helping us un-fuck the world. And on that thought ...

Now cut to today, and we're ordering pizza by bellowing at an all-seeing game box that never stops listening to you. And we love it!

Yahoo News
Shouting "I hate myself!" works, too.

I'm not disparaging today's less-privacy-concerned world, but rather pointing out what a tremendous wad of nothing Big Brother turned out to be. Instead of silently eradicating us for thoughtcrime, technology's meaty clasp on our personal identity culminated in selling custom T-shirts on Facebook. This would explain why newer dystopias like Maze Runner and The Hunger Games don't nearly demonize technology and surveillance as much as older films. Katniss might live in a world in which it's implied that the Capitol is always watching, but that surveillance is a secondary annoyance. For the most part, all she has to do is stay indoors or walk outside the boundary, and no one is the wiser.

Lionsgate
The "no hunting" law is apparently enforced by an honor system.

Not to mention how the all-seeing cameras are actually utilized by the heroes, as Katniss uses her reality TV persona to gain public support. It's hard to paint cameras as an evil entity now that everyone has one on their phones. As the media gets more and more of its information from Twitter and Reddit, the sad truth is that Big Brother doesn't need to watch us; we crowdsourced that ourselves.

Hell, other dystopian films will even flat-out glorify otherwise terrifying inventions. Elysium ends with (spoilers: you don't care) the heroes bestowing magic ailment-curing machines on the common folk on Earth ... which is really gonna fuck with the already-overpopulated, resource-lacking planet. And yet these genie beds get featured as inconsequentially as the amazing robots that no one in this society cares about. Because, again, robots aren't the main aggressor anymore.

TriStar Pictures
They've gone from "EXTERMINATE" to "please take away that sharpie."

Even The Matrix ends with an amicable truce between humans and their robot overlords, implying that being harvested in an automated factory isn't the worst thing in the world. But that is by far not the weirdest precedent this series set for us ...

And this is every dystopian-themed movie now. We've tossed away the horrors of "thoughtcrimes" and conditioning and replaced the worst possible oppressive fate with simple pain and dying. Every struggle is physical and literal, from maze-running to hunger-gaming to, uh, whatever Divergent is about. Or having your clone organs harvested in The Island -- which happens to be the perfect movie for explaining why we no longer fear brainwashing.

Warner Bros.

Warner Bros.
The most unfeasible dystopia: One where people use Bing.

Like every Michael Bay film, The Island was dick-packed with aggressive product placement. Meanwhile, this autumn's hottest film about a famine-wracked plutocracy is being brought to us by Subway's savory new Sriracha Chicken Melt.

Subway

Subway
"May the odds of not catching fiery diarrhea be ever in your favor."

It's hard to make a movie about brainwashing when you're also trying to cultivate corporate synergy. But who gives a fuck? We don't! Since the '70s, our lives have been lousy with advertisements. Perhaps the fear of brainwashing has become less prevalent, due to how unaffected we are by the casual mind control thrown at us every day. Or maybe they brainwashed us into not caring about brainwashing anymore. The point is that Subway's new Sriracha Chicken Melt is both a bold and healthy meal solution for any occasion.

If there was a running theme in the sci-fi stories coming out of the '50s through to the '80s, it was "FUCK SOCIALISM." Books, films, and films about books, like Logan's Run, THX 1138, and Fahrenheit 451, were steeped in the fear of sameness, forced equality, and censorship creating the social and economic disparity we imagined would result from a communist takeover.

But in the '20s and '30s, we saw films like Metropolis and Battleship Potemkin get away with demonizing a wealthy class and being praised in a US that was nearing an economic clusterfuck. Much like how everyone's feeling the Bern today, socialism was kind of popular during the Great Depression. And coincidentally, we are also ass-deep in dystopian movies whose main struggles are between corrupt upper and heroic lower classes.

Lionsgate
It's like Occupy Wall Street, but with somehow stupider hairstyles.

The Purge is about a day of reckoning designed for the wealthy to prey on the poor, Elysium is about the one percent living on a giant space yacht above earth, In Time is about how life is literally money, Snowpiercer is about hobo Captain America pushing his way into first class, and The Hunger Games, of course, is about the wealthy Capitol lording over the poor and working. Even the new Mad Max features a water-rich maniac dwelling above the unfortunate like a warlord. In every instance, we see a total lack of a middle class -- much like real life.

NBC News

The Daily Beast
The difference is, the despot with the crazy hair might come to power through an election.

It's not just dystopian films. Look at the '90s, when Kevin Spacey and Edward Norton played heroically bored middle-class whiners and Batman was a celebrated playboy and not a cold-hearted one-percenter. Now, even Captain America can't afford a place in Brooklyn anymore, implying that everyone is equally screwed by the economic situation. And it's this shared misery that creates yet another new trope in the sci-fi dystopian genre ...

If there was ever a baffling attribute that all modern fictional dystopias seem to have, it's that the characters now know that they are living in one. In the first Hunger Games, we see a cluster of districts full of people who can't be more bummed to sit and watch their kids gets speared through the torso. Unlike The Running Man, at no point does the film try to portray the bulk of society as being conditioned to enjoy their death-tertainment. In fact, they all look pretty pissed about it.

Lionsgate

Lionsgate
Except the rich minority, but they're barely people (see: previous entry).

It takes only a freaking year for V to rally all of miserable-ass London in the V For Vendetta movie. There is no effective propaganda, and no real brainwashing or doublespeak. The act of curb-stomping Parliament boiled down to scrounging postage cash for Halloween masks and revolution muumuus.

Warner Bros.
Reality has since revealed that this scene would smell like BO and pot.

Snowpiercer, Elysium, Maze Runner -- here, the oppressed people have no delusions about their terrible situation. So when our hero stands up and says "Fuck this shit," it's only a matter of everyone grabbing those pitchforks and bum-rushing the cleanest-looking faces.

I know it sounds crazy-obvious that the people stuck in a hellhole society would no longer wish to be in that hellhole, but in terms of the plot, it hardly makes for a logical or terrifying film. Suddenly, we have to wonder why it took so long for the government to be overthrown, and why a single individual can make such a huge difference when everyone else was equally angry the whole time. Older films, like the original Mad Max, Nineteen Eighty-Four, The Warriors, and Planet Of The Apes, were the polar opposite. They were told from the perspective of a few sane individuals caught in a world where the mob mentality was against them. Usually, the horde was pro-tyranny, and the struggle tended to be the hero's personal journey of realization and escape. Extra points if they started out being oppressive dicks themselves, as in Fahrenheit 451 and Logan's Run.

Anglo Enterprises

MGM
The most effective tool against tyranny: blondes.

The deeper into hopelessness these films started, the more powerful the hero's marginal struggle to get out. This is why we loved watching Neo learn his powers in the first Matrix, but hated watching him indifferently use them to pummel agents in the subsequent films. There's nothing emotionally cathartic about exploding CGI bodies of Hugo Weaving -- at least, in terms of revolutionary satisfaction. But like every modern version of this genre, we can't leave it at the one hero finding hope ...