1990s SF film
Fortress, 1993, USA DIRECTED BY STUART GORDON
I generally dislike this kind of macho SF movie, but Fortress's best-realised aspects are its dystopian elements: in 2017 John Brennick and his wife are sent to a maximum security prison just for the crime of trying to have a second baby; everything that comes after that is an abandonment of science fiction, being little more than a relentless vision of legitimised cruelty, a THX-1138 with attitude. The America they live in seems dystopian enough, however inside their remote desert prison they are subjected to an environment that is somehow beyond any human capacity for the institutionalised infliction of pain: it turns out this corporately-run prison is populated by dehumanised gun-wielding cyborgs and the all-seeing computer called Zed-10. It's a grimly amusing film and thematically simple enough: our technology is our Big Brother, it possesses no compassion, we must liberate ourselves from it and reclaim our humanity (indeed even the prison director wishes he were more human). Ultimately that's not much different a premise from something like Robert Wise's The Andromeda Strain, only this time done as less cerebral entertainment: put some people inside a fully-automated environment and watch them work their way out. Also it gives no clue as to how or why the prison service depicted became that way, or even if outside society is aware of the nature of the nightmare going on inside. Production-wise this falls somewhere between an A and a B movie, it was obviously fun to make and thankfully never takes itself too seriously; Christopher Lambert is OK though he does have to put up with a consistently scene-stealing performance from Jeffrey Combs.
Fortress 2: Re-Entry, 1999, USA DIRECTED BY GEOFF MURPHY
Lambert once again is John Brennick, and he's banged up once more having been recaptured by the evil Men-tel Corporation, only this time his prison is somewhere in Earth orbit. No surprises when or how he escapes, which means he and a few other inmates just go through the motions of cracking the security measures before getting back to Earth with as much hassle as can be crammed into the remaining hour or so. Science is emphatically ignored for the sake of some predictable blue-screen action (which once again means this is a science fiction movie in appearance only, and the CGI effects were hardly state-of-the-art, even then) though at one point there is a re-take of a particularly famous (and obviously much better done) scene from 2001. At least Fortress had a dangerous edge to the plot and setting and an undercurrent of inhuman insanity; this, in comparison, is slapstick. It will undoubtedly already have ended up on a few "Sequels That Should Never Have Been Made" lists, including, one day, mine.