Dystopian Sci-Fi Movie Worlds Ranked By How Horrible They'd Be To Live In

We love dystopias. There's something shuddery and intriguing about exploring a world that's a lot like ours, but there's something wrong with it. We fall to the allure of it. Sure, this brave new world is terrible, but how cool would it be to survive? Maybe even become a hero? And for many of our favorite dystopian stories, survivability feels possible — at least for a while. These scenarios borrow from today and hold warnings about what tomorrow could be unless we act. We feel prepared by watching them. We feel, for a little while, empowered.

The reality of living in these worlds could be much worse than we want to believe. In a post-apocalyptic world, where are you going to get your prescription lenses or your life-saving medications? Clean water is scarce in many of these nightmare scenarios. Famine might drive us to horrible acts. Other scenarios seem cool, but would you be allowed to even exist? These stories are about people's extraordinary efforts to thrive, and sometimes they fail. Let's explore some of our favorite dystopias and imagine what it would be like to try and live in them.

There are two aspects to society in Duncan Jones' feature debut, "Moon." We mostly see one: Sam Bell's (Sam Rockwell) lonely life as a mining facility operator on the moon. Earth seems to be doing okay, although Jones' later film, "Mute," shows off a grungy neon cityscape that feels like Berlin's future city planners watched "Blade Runner" but didn't think the logistics all the way through. Still, Sam Bell's family looks like they're all right, suggesting an upgraded middle or lower-class existence is possible.

Yet, Sam still needs a job to survive in this world, and his recruiters shuffle him around until a place called Lunar Industries grants him a contract for a nice, quiet job on the moon — something that feels like a lighthouse gig in space. Until Sam's big whistleblower incident happens, you'd have no idea what he signed up for. Is living in this contractual hell, a piece of you stuck in a cloning rinse-wash-repeat cycle, that much different than a soul-crushing job shucking boxes in the warehouses of one of the biggest corporations in history? At least on the moon, Gerty's not timing your bathroom breaks.

"Gattaca" is already an art piece about how much life in this deceptively beautiful future blows. It blends classism and eugenics into something both callous and as socially relevant as the evening news. The genetically engineered will always get first crack at the best of everything despite laws meant to prevent discrimination against the naturally — and therefore, imperfectly — conceived. These "invalids" get the slop jobs and the crummier housing.

While Ethan Hawke's idealistic invalid, Vincent, overcomes countless obstacles to achieve his dream of becoming an astronaut, that's not realistic for pretty much anyone else. Surviving in this soulless IKEA display would be pretty easy, but most of us today wouldn't even be allowed to be born here. Our smallest flaws would derail any chance we had for a comfortable life, and so many of the people that we love would be tossed aside as mistakes. That's breathtakingly awful to imagine. It's a genocide of what makes us human, flaws and all.

Win the dice roll and you could have an amazing life up on the torus ring of Elysium. It's a paradise built from a real NASA prototype a think tank proposed in the '70s. Neil Blomkamp's "Elysium" presents the dream realized: a perfect Earth colony of luxury with all our needs tended to and our health cared for from the comfort of our Versace med-beds.

Unfortunately, the dice are loaded, and our future selves are vastly more likely to be born in the sprawling mega-slums that have transformed our Earth. If you're not connected to the wealthy and powerful, you're going to work for beans in unsafe facilities, strung along by the lie that you could earn your way up to the stars. That's all too real in America today, but in the future of "Elysium," at least the forgotten Earthbound are unionizing by force. Life here might be hell, and we'd probably die young and broken, but there's a better chance you'll get to pop a rich jerk in their face once we overrun the ring.

The world of "Children of Men" is ready to fail. The elderly and the infirm of England are incentivized to use the Quietus, a formal, painless method of suicide that leaves a financial boon to the next of kin and eases the resource strain on the country. Immigrants are met with systemic violence. Social psychology is scarred so deeply by human infertility that we treat our beloved fur babies as our only viable replacement for human ones as a method to cope with the imminent end of us all.

We don't see much of what the rest of the world is dealing with as we follow Theo Faron (Clive Owen) and the pro-immigrant faction that's hiding the first pregnant woman in decades. However, the doleful cinematography and the politics of the United Kingdom leave us with clues. The Earth no longer wants us, making this dystopia one we should ever want to live in — if for no other reason but to respect that decision. Resource scarcity and mortal depression feel too real today, and there's little comfort to be found if we had to try to live in this broken London.

Stylistically similar to Terry Gilliam's "Brazil," "Snowpiercer," directed by Bong Joon-ho, is an adaptation of a French comic that foretells a world of few survivors on a frozen Earth. Society is packed into trains that run ceaselessly across the world. Classism allows the elite to feast on the plight of the poor. If you were trapped in a world like this one, imagine the smell. Even in the forward cars, people smell in closed quarters. Water is at a premium. The stink of the train's oils and electricity will always be in the air.

As in "Elysium," there's a chance you might find yourself among the privileged, but it's far likelier you'll be in the cattle cars. Sure, there's a guy that looks like Chris Evans, but your fate could be as simple as winding up an awful-tasting protein bar for your friends to eat. It's life, of a sort, but it's not desirable. The end of the film suggests that the world beyond the train is healing, and someone with a gift for survivalism and the right gear to keep warm might make it — but to do what? It's going to be decades of hard living and starvation before the first villages thrive.

The thing about some doomsday preppers is that they always think they're going to be the ones to survive the collapse of society and come out of it like kings. "Mad Max" is a good lesson about how you're far more likely to end up as roadkill. In a society where it's every person for themselves and there are few reliable methods of subsistence farming or clean water, death is fast and merciless.

Society hasn't completely collapsed in the first "Mad Max," but it's clear the world is as sundered as Max's (Mel Gibson) sanity by the end. Two sequels show the world in even worse straits with wars over gas and small towns led by eccentric tyrants. "Fury Road" depicts the only way to survive in a dead world like this: Find the ones you can trust and fight and die for them to keep the dream alive. Immortan Joe (Hugh Keays-Byrne) warps this ideal. He's a tyrant's dream, but Max (Tom Hardy) finds himself among the women, who are usually disregarded in these apocalypses. With them, there's a new message about nurturing one another. Untrusting dangerous loners die in this world. Together we could survive but not easily. Death will still be close.

At no point should anyone volunteer to live in one of Cormac McCarthy's worlds. While many of his books feel post-apocalyptic despite their historical settings, like the bleak "Blood Meridian," "The Road" goes all-in on a dystopian future. The reasons why this Earth is shattered are beyond the knowledge of the Man (Viggo Mortensen) and his son. It doesn't matter — except in the sense that there's no redemption for it or them.

Cannibalism is common in this hellscape, as there's little left to scavenge. It feels too innocent, too improbable, to bet on the kindness of others, and even though the boy is left in the hands of a self-proclaimed "good guy" in the end, we can't know that's true. The chances of long-term survival in this world are slim to none. This is the ultimate scenario for a doomsday prepper: You have only yourself, your wits, and your resources, but in McCarthy's dead-end world, those won't save you. They'll only prolong your suffering. "The Road" is depressing to the max, and it's the clearest example yet of a dystopian world that no one should ever yearn for.