Help me find this dystopian movie!

September 14, 2009 6:01 PM

NameThisMovieFilter: Dystopian society of people living in a domed city, who don't leave their homes and spend a great deal of their time in their dream machines.

-Before you suggest it, this is not logan's run
-Made in the 80s/early 90s?

Synopsis:
Humanity is dying out because of lack of contact with one another and one girl decides to break the rules and escape the dome. There are people living outside the dome, and romance ensues.

At some point, she challenges a man inside the dome who is the controller of the dream machines- he may or may not be her father, and there is some question as to whether her entire escape was simply a dream.

---

A friend of mine would like desperately to see this, and my googlefu is really failing me. It sounds pretty interesting, so I'd like to try to see it myself, if the hivemind might oblige and provide a name. Details may or may not be entirely correct, but I have no way of knowing, since I haven't seen it myself!

Thanks, hive!

posted by sunshinesky to media & arts (10 comments total)

reminds me a bit of "The Starlost"
posted by bruceo at 6:20 PM on September 14

Mindwarp (1992)
posted by plokent at 6:27 PM on September 14

Mindwarp sounds very promising. I've passed it along, and we'll see what the friend thinks. I'm not sure whether to be disappointed or excited that this is a Bruce flick... it sounded more serious than a B movie.
posted by sunshinesky at 6:48 PM on September 14

This is surprisingly close to the plot of a pair of Monica Hughes* books, Devil on My Back and The Dream Catcher. I can't imagine they were ever made into a movie, though. My quick search turns up nothing.

* A Canadian writer who wrote a lot of great young adult science fiction.
posted by PercussivePaul at 6:48 PM on September 14

It's not THX 1138, but similar in premise. Instead of living in Dream machines, the protagonists are heavily medicated.
posted by at the crossroads at 7:05 PM on September 14

Man, googling around this seems to be a surprisingly common SciFi theme. Thanks to PercussivePaul, I remember this as the plot to the book The Dream Catcher:

Her unruly psychic powers make teen-age Ruth an outsider in the close society of Ark Three, but they allow her to receive thoughts from another post-holocaust community on the other side of the mountains. The Arks are domed communities set up when it became evident that America was on the verge of collapse, but, isolated thereafter for centuries, they have diverged greatly. Ark Three is a democracy based on psychic communion, but the Ark Ruth discovers has used technology to create a slave state. Ruth guides an expedition to this Ark and is instrumental in breaking the power of its totalitarian computer.
posted by sbutler at 7:11 PM on September 14

Man, googling around this seems to be a surprisingly common SciFi theme.

Yeah, that's where I ran into trouble with my own googlefu.

Having now taken a peak at some videos with it listed under the title "Brain Slashers", I'm pretty confident that this is the movie she meant. We'll know in the morning from her, but the shoe fits, so I'm going to go ahead and mark plokent's as best answer.
posted by sunshinesky at 7:14 PM on September 14

For whatever it's worth, this idea has been around at least since EM Forster's The Machine Stops.
posted by adamrice at 7:43 PM on September 14 [1 favorite has favorites]

Reminds me of THX-1138, or maybe 1984 or Brave New World. All 3 are excellent, and of course, the books are better than the movies!
posted by Jinx of the 2nd Law at 10:07 PM on September 14

I have confirmation! Yet another name-this-* resolved on mefi within a half hour.
posted by sunshinesky at 4:34 AM on September 15