Science fiction has always provided a tantalizing look at promising possible futures, techno-topias replete with capsulized food, flying cars, robot servants, and cybernetic or genetic enhancements that grant superhuman abilities. But the dire prospects of technological advancements instead ushering in fatalistic future dystopias are also a common theme in sci-fi movies, and not just in cynical contemporary cinema. In fact, the very first feature-length sci-fi film, Fritz Lang's 1927 Metropolis, gave us the gilded cyborg Maschinenmensch that inspired the helpful, if neurotic, C-3PO, but it did so in a cautionary tale about technology being usurped by the wealthy to suppress the working class. In the 1950s, moviegoers couldn't get enough of sci-fi films in which heroic protagonists in silver jumpsuits battled external threats to the Earth in the form of mutant monsters or little green men. And yet, movies like 1951's The Day the Earth Stood Still pointed out that our own nuclear