Why do modern sci-fi films feel less hopeful and more dystopian?
We’ve all grown up hearing the infamous tales of technology taking over the globe in films, books, and shows. We thought that this take-over was an amateur story for the sake of puns. It’s time to face the fact that we may be in a toxic relationship with Artificial Intelligence — a relationship that has taken our hopeful outlook and made it dystopian.
Since the innovation of AI technology, the 2020’s has films showing the future in a more eerie way than in the past and films incorporate AI into their fictional worlds. Ranging from sci-fi kids films like Wall-E (2008) to questionable movies about AI robot girlfriends like Companion (2025), these films show a dystopian outlook.
Take a movie that also came out last year, The Assessment (2025). This movie covers the topic of AI inventions, like virtual reality children, and equates it to things that better society, like medical research and even going so far as to equate it with being a doctor. Comparing AI intervention with life-saving medical research was normalized and almost hidden in plain sight — the film seeks to invoke a “has always been here” sort of feel and that this is what the future looks like with AI integration Despite many people feeling that AI is the unsolicited guest on the party list that you have no idea how it got in.
Not to say that you should start wrapping your head with tinfoil, but mainstream media depicted technology as either positive or Orwellian. The future technology revolutionized society (up until the 2010’s) was focused on making our lives easier and was retro-futuristic, focusing on a positive perspective of innovation we have yet to have, like The Jettesons. Or technology would cause a 1984 Orwellian society type system, (ie. The Hunger Games) where we all subconsciously have the understanding that a substantial amount of tech advancement already exists.
In the past, we knew there was something to come but we weren’t sure what. Now, we have a snapshot of what to expect, but AI generated essays and chat prompts causing psychosis is just the beginning. People are starting to ask the question: if certain innovation is even helpful anymore, or if it’s weakening our ability to critically think.This technology is not letting us do what humans were designed to do; take on challenges and create, and this is showing in the dystopian nature of our films. But maybe one day we all can have an AI girlfriend.
