There’s something vaguely superior about most dystopian movies. We can all point to terrible events and modes of thinking in our current world and convince ourselves things are only going to get worse—that’s easy. But when a filmmaker puts his most dismal vision for our collective future onscreen, we’re somehow supposed to pretend these terrible premonitions could never have occurred to little old us, instead hailing them as a feat of imaginative brilliance. An authoritarian government that sponsors ruthless reality TV shows in which desperate individuals compete for cash to pay their basic medical bills? That sounds pretty awful. But in 2025, it’s not really that far-fetched, and any action thriller built around an idea like that needs to be mechanically sound, and thrilling, by itself.

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