The World in Three Films

I recently asked a question that turned out to be more revealing than I expected. If you had to choose three films that together explain the world we are living in, what would they be?

Not favourites. Not the best films ever made. Simply the films that feel as though they are quietly describing how things now work.

What struck me was not the diversity of answers, but their consistency. People did not reach for apocalyptic visions or grand dystopias. They chose worlds that continue functioning perfectly well, even as something essential has slipped out of reach.

Markets still operate. Governments still speak. Technology still advances. Yet the films people instinctively reach for are not about collapse so much as displacement. It is not the end of the world, but the loss of agency inside it.

For much of the twentieth century, future anxiety was event-based. Nuclear war. Environmental catastrophe. Totalitarian takeover. The fear was that something terrible would happen. Today’s cultural imagination seems preoccupied with something quieter and more unsettling. What if nothing dramatic happens at all, yet individuals increasingly feel irrelevant inside systems that carry on regardless?

This is why films like Brazil, Network, The Big Short, The Wolf of Wall Street and Trading Places appear. These are not stories about villains. They are stories about incentives, procedures and momentum. No one appears fully in charge, yet outcomes are decisive all the same. Power is embedded, procedural and difficult to locate.

There are stories about lone men with a purpose navigating power Gladiator, Rocky, 12 Angry Men, Spartacus.

Other choices circle around reality itself. The Matrix, Inception, Total Recall, Westworld - even Sliding Doors. These films are less interested in truth than in who gets to frame it. When reality becomes something that can be edited, narrated or packaged, behaviour follows the frame rather than the facts. Which is why Wag The Dog gets more than a singular mention.

Identity, too, appears under sustained pressure. Blade Runner, Ex Machina, Her, Gattaca. Often described as films about technology, they are more accurately films about conditional humanity. What happens when identity becomes functional rather than intrinsic. When you are valued not for who you are, but for what you can be measured, predicted or optimised to do. Fight Club gets a mention here for what happens if you think about that too much.

Some people cited Children of Men, perhaps because of its atmosphere. A world where everything still works, yet the future has narrowed. No explosion. No great ending. Just exhaustion and quiet despair. Collapse without rubble.

Comedy, tellingly, appears just as often. Mrs Doubtfire, Dr Strangelove, Life of Brian. Satire flourishes when critique is still possible, but seriousness feels captured. Laughter becomes a way of pointing at systems that no longer can withstand being laughed at.

One particularly elegant response from Dave Birch framed three films as a generational arc. A wartime farce as the world of parents, shaped by hierarchy, empire and inherited power, softened by humour (Carry On Up The Khyber) . A financial comedy as the world of adulthood, defined by incentives, markets and the belief that the system is fair if you understand the rules (Trading Places). A dystopian satire of the world that children are growing up in, shaped by attention, amplification and antisocial media dynamics (Idiocracy).

It is a neat summary of how systems evolve, but also how they feel to inhabit. Each generation inherits not just institutions, but assumptions about whether participation still matters.

Taken together, these choices suggest something important. People are not afraid of the end of the world. They are afraid of becoming spectators in it. Of living inside systems that no longer require understanding, consent or authorship in order to function.

People sense that something fundamental has shifted in the relationship between control, agency and identity. They just do not yet have the language to describe it.

Which brings me, finally, to my own three films.

Lord of War, because it shows how the world actually functions not to mention plausible deniability. Wag the Dog, because it reveals how reality itself can be manufactured when everything is optics. And Blade Runner, because it asks the most unsettling question of all. What happens when systems no longer care whether a self exists?

I do not offer these as answers but as signals. Taken together, they point to something I have been circling for some time now. A sense that we are living through a change that is not yet fully visible, but is already widely felt.

If you would like the full list of fims people submitted, drop me a line.