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I get that and definitely felt that it’s similarities to other stories, especially Minority Report and the book version of V for Vendetta, hurt it, but thematically I think it still reads as powerful because you see people blindly accepting hype that way and corporations still function in that manner. Maybe it’s not novel, but I thought it mostly feeling vital was a more important quality.

knives wrote: Thu Jul 30, 2026 2:07 am...corporations still function in that manner.

I don't think they do! I don't think the corporate behavior in the movie resembled today's corporate behavior at all.

Today's corporations just want to put a happy dancing logo on their shit so that people will buy it. It's basically all a big marketing loop. All the data collection, all the surveillance is just to build marketing databases. They're not screaming "BLOODLUST IS YOUR BIRTHRIGHT!" as people get slaughtered on live TV.

That's not even a slippery-slope projection of today's trends. It's stuck in the dystopian view of what people of the 1980s thought the future would be like. The dopey brainless corporatism of Idiocracy is a much more shrewd projection of how today's corporation function than what King dreamt up in 1982. We're much closer to "Ass" being a hit show than something like "The Running Man."

I don’t think it’s a reflection of television, but it doesn’t take much to connect the dots between what’s shown in the film and what we get from tech companies destroying people and sucking up to the government for deregulation and what’s in the film. The show itself is high concept silliness, but the world it presents seems relatable to the now.

I was thinking of the Luigi assassination during parts as well as data center pollution and tech cult of personalities. That core is the real politics not the game.

knives wrote: Thu Jul 30, 2026 2:40 am I don’t think it’s a reflection of television, but it doesn’t take much to connect the dots between what’s shown in the film and what we get from tech companies destroying people and sucking up to the government for deregulation and what’s in the film. The show itself is high concept silliness, but the world it presents seems relatable to the now.

I was thinking of the Luigi assassination during parts as well as data center pollution and tech cult of personalities. That core is the real politics not the game.

Well, we'll have to agree to disagree, I guess. I don't think that any of those things have anything to do with each other, much less anything in the movie, except the general concept that "corporations are bad." Seems like that general concept is a hammer making the whole world a nail.