We are now living in a golden age of dystopian films; that is, incredibly depressing films set at some point in the future – often, the relatively near future – where life is a complete mess and no one is happy, not even the fascist scum who run things. In the few instances where people seem to be happy, it’s only because the fascist scum have tricked them into thinking they’re happy. Well, they won’t stay happy for long. This is not utopia. This is utopia turned on its head. This is dystopia.

Last year, there was a tsunami of dystopian films, including The Hunger Games: Mockingjay – Part 1, Dawn of the Planet of the Apes, Divergent, The Maze Runner, Robocop, The Purge: Anarchy, Snowpiercer, The Rover, Automata and The Giver. This record-breaking plethora of dystopian motion pictures – not all of which were of the highest artistic quality – arrived fast on the heels of Elysium, The Purge, The Hunger Games: Catching Fire and Oblivion, released the year before, which themselves followed Looper, Cloud Atlas, Dredd, Total Recall and the original Hunger Games, all of which lit up the screen in 2012. The message in all these films is identical: we have seen the future. And it looks bad.

Dystopian films used to be one-offs such as Soylent Green or Blade Runner; dark, disturbing glimpses of the future that popped up from time to time, but not every other week. Back in the olden days – say, 2005 – there was a public consensus that while an occasional depressing film about an Orwellian future was OK, a whole slew of them would be a major downer. Now, however, these films are coming in bunches, turning into tent-pole franchises, to use industry gobbledegook. More dystopian films are on the way. Many, many, many more. Whoops! Some are already here. Films with names like Chappie. And Insurgent. And Dawn of the First Bank Holiday After Armageddon. And 1984: Part III.

A scene from Insurgent.

A few technical notes: dystopian films are set in future societies where civilisation has broken down and the legal system is a farce and the cops are all thugs on the take – unless they happen to be robots who do not believe in the virtues of an independent judiciary and a bicameral legislative system – and the high-rises are all run by heavily tattooed gangsters who do not treat women with the respect they deserve. Though details may vary from film to film – there are not always high-rises in dystopia because nuclear war has already levelled them – this is the basic premise of films as varied as Mad Max, Dredd, The Matrix, Minority Report, The Postman, Waterworld and District 9.

In dystopian films, for which Blade Runner or Judge Dredd often provide the template, there is usually very little in the way of high-quality mass transit, epicurean-quality food is hard to come by, and everyone looks as if they got their fashion cues from Alice Cooper. Also, France no longer seems to exist in the future. Women wear a lot of mascara in dystopian societies. So do men. Even in the distant future, harmless, non-threatening young people will get tattoos in a desperate attempt to make themselves look scary. And as a general rule, whenever the camera descends into the lair of the rebel nerd who is trying to stymie the forces of darkness, the geeky upstart will be working on a computer that looks as if it was designed in 1978. It’s as though the smartwatch never happened.

There is almost always an underground group of dissidents in dystopian films. They often live underground – get it? – in subterranean cities that look as if they were designed for Orcs or cost-conscious dwarves. At least one dissident will look like the Girl with the Dragon Tattoo. Another will be old and wise. Another will look like Josh Hartnett’s kid brother. Nor are James Franco clones totally unheard of. These outgunned mavericks will make common cause with plucky freedom fighters seeking to bring back peace, justice, sensible urban planning and reliable plumbing. So far, they lack a leader. They are waiting for the messiah. But Tom Cruise or Shailene Woodley will do, in a pinch.

Olga Kurylenko and Tom Cruise as Julia and Jack Harper in Oblivion. Photograph: Universal Pictures/Allstar

In dystopian films, the hero usually starts out as a rube who wants no part of the rebellion, but is finally persuaded to enter the lists. This is just as true of Katniss Everdeen in The Hunger Games as it is of Snake Plissken in Escape From New York and/or LA. With surprising frequency, the person who bails out mankind will have two Ss in their name. No one knows why. But these free-wheeling saviours will only join the revolution because of enormous peer pressure. Or because somebody gets them really mad.

Unlike monster movies, which usually have a few lighthearted moments, dystopian films are basically sad. Everyone is desperately unhappy and wishes they were dead, except for a microscopic cabal of spectacularly evil people who run things, plus their murderous henchmen. Occasionally (The Giver), people think they are happy, but that is only because the cunning fascist overlords have induced them to trade freedom for tranquility. The normal rules of etiquette do not apply in the dystopian world, and nobody gives up their seat on the tube for old people. Also, the lighting is very poor. As for the state school system: forget it. No tax credits, no magnet schools, no English-as-a-second language programmes anywhere.

The classic dystopian film is Escape from LA. This is a sardonic twist, because Los Angeles was once viewed as a paradise that ordinary Americans wanted to escape to, but in the City of the Futuristic Angels life has turned into hell. In this environment, civilisation, such as it is, can only be saved by somebody like Keanu Reeves or Kurt Russell. Things do not look promising. It just so happens that Russell is a real-life resident of Los Angeles. This is sometimes referred to in the trade as “irony”.

Kurt Russell as Snake Plissken in Escape From LA. Photograph: Paramount/Allstar

Dystopian films always posit a world that is going to be even worse than the one we are living in. As Imran Siddiquee pointed out last year in the Atlantic, it is a world where white people are the ones doing most of the suffering. It is a world where white people get to masquerade as oppressed minorities. This is like Marie Antoinette dressing up as a penniless shepherdess in Petit Trianon. Real-life shepherdesses hated that stuff. It’s one of the reasons Marie Antoinette got her head chopped off. France under Robespierre was nothing if not a dystopian society. Marie Antoinette found that out the hard way. So did her husband.

The closest Hollywood ever comes to a dystopian film where minorities are the ones with the biggest problems is District 9. District 9 was made by a white person. Black film-makers probably don’t see the point of making films about future societies where injustice is rampant and children go hungry and the poor are persecuted. Minorities are already living in that world. So are poor people in general. Why worry about what’s going to happen in the year 2525? Things look bad enough in Nigeria and Bolivia and Detroit right now.

Often, the dystopian vision of the future is a cyberpunk wild west with robots and spaceships instead of prairie schooners and stagecoaches. In this sense, the films are futuristic versions of cowboy movies, which depicted a world where law and order had vanished and ornery varmints and back-shooting dry-gulchers mercilessly dispatched honest sodbusters and prim schoolmarms to Boot Hill and everybody was waiting for the murderous Apaches or the bloodthirsty Comanches to show up and stake all the men out in the hot sun and let the fire ants get to them. It was no fun whatsoever.

Daryl Hannah as Pris in Blade Runner. Photograph: Warner Bros/Allstar

That said, there was a positive, life-affirming element in all this high-plains dreariness, and not just because Shane or Wyatt Earp would eventually turn up and sort out the bad guys. Audiences could breathe a sigh of relief because all this horrible stuff had happened in the distant past, and now the crisis had passed. Westerns were made for people who believed that the future looked bright because all the gunslingers and back-shooters and double-dealing law dogs and humourless Comancheros were long gone. What made the old west so attractive was that it was old.

Dystopian films appeal to people who believe the exact opposite about the future. Dystopophiles agree that the past looked bad, as does the present, but they are convinced that the future is going to be really, really bad, a satanic melange of all the abominations of the past fused with new depravities dreamed up by even worse people in the future. People who will make Mussolini and Stalin and Phil Collins seem like lovable little lambs. A case can be made that people who really, really like dystopian films should get out more.

Why do films such as The Hunger Games and Elysium and Dredd always depict a world where everyone is miserable? Why do films such as Divergent and The Giver always depict a world where ordinary people are brain-dead drones clad in Cultural Revolution-mode pyjamas? It could be because we as a species honestly believe that the future looks bleak, that the only thing any of us has to look forward to is repression and robotic cops and obsolete computers and Siouxsie and the Banshees-era haberdashery. Which makes it easier to die, knowing that we may have got out while the getting was good.

Jennifer Lawrence as Katniss Everdeen in The Hunger Games: Mockingjay – Part 1. Photograph: Allstar/Lionsgate/Sportsphoto Ltd

Or maybe it’s because mature adults are envious of their grandchildren, and figure that if they themselves are not going to be around to enjoy the future, nobody else should enjoy it either. This isn’t very nice, but it’s exactly the way the middle-aged mind operates: après moi, le déluge, as Louis XVI’s granddad once put it. Boy, was he ever on the money.

Here is a key question: why do directors so rarely make a film about the future where society is not a grim, totalitarian nightmare? If we honestly believe that the history of mankind is a record of steady, though not uninterrupted, progress – the dark ages stopped western civilisation dead in its tracks for about 700 years, and the first world war was certainly no picnic – why can’t we imagine a world not so far in the future where civilisation has not collapsed and thugs do not rule the world and the lighting is actually pretty good? I am talking about movies where Cameron Diaz and Sandra Bullock have a lot of fun with their madcap girlfriends. I am talking about Big Momma 2259. I am talking about films such as Hot Tub Time Machine 14, where plump, retirement-age hipsters from the prosperous, fashion-conscious 2060s go back in time to sneer at the fedoras and red hi-top sneakers they used to wear to important social functions – like mum’s funeral – back in 2015, when male fashion sense was at its absolute historical nadir.

The closest we ever get to this is a film such as Woody Allen’s Sleeper, where a dinky health food store owner goes in for a routine checkup and wakes up 200 years later to find … a dystopian society run by totalitarians! Which brings us right back to square one: those who can’t remember the films about the future that were made in the past are condemned to repeat … the present.