Exploring Dystopia

This has been a 'depressing' week. No, not literally. I'm calling it depressing because of all the stuff that I watched this week, right from 'The Walking Dead' to 'The Maze Runner'. We don't exactly live in a way that can be called utopian with all the problems and wrongdoing all around us, a dystopian world still looks far more dark and depressing & no one would like to actually experience it (though situations in war-torn countries and the nations fighting poverty & famine aren't very different from that of a dystopia). 

The west is much more obsessed with the concept of Dystopia than us. That explains why there are so many novels, TV series and movies set in a Dystopian universe. We hardly have any material based on it here in India. The reason is very obvious - the people are not interested in such gloomy stuff. We are still caught in the process of making our lives better, worth living. A piece of fiction depicting a dark, depressing future isn't something we Indians would cherish a lot. 

Anyway. coming back to the two titles I discussed above. I am almost done with the season 3 of The Walking Dead. The series has got me hooked like anything. I have a taste for movies based on zombies due to the sheer thrill they provide. However, what makes TWD different is the human drama. Almost every good movie/book/TV series in the post-apocalypse/Dystopian genre has emphasized more on the meltdown of morality, compassion and pathos as the life takes the form of an survival exercise almost every day. TWD has captured that transition very well. I will be discussing in TWD in detail in few days when I will be done with the season 4. 

I saw 'The Maze Runner', latest film in the young-adult adaptations, last Sunday. The premise of the film is simpler when compared to 'The Hunger Games' or 'Divergent', and only towards the end it is revealed that the movie is set in a post-apocalyptic age. Don't count this revelation as a spoiler as little has been shown on screen and all the answers will be (hopefully) provided by the sequel. The movie works well as a thriller and the premise (a group of teenagers trapped in an open field surrounded by a giant maze which is inhabited by mechanical monsters called grievers) is all about survival of small group of young boys under testing conditions. This is what we actually see in most of the movies set in dystopian world. The action is good, there are some edge-of-the-seat moments and film isn't too philosophical. So, it works perfectly as a decent time pass, even if the subject matter is grim and the movie ends on a cliffhanger.