I've spent rather a lot of time thinking about the problem of utopianism and film in recent years. First, it might be helpful to make some basic distinctions between technological utopianism, the belief that a perfect society can be constructed through both the expansion of technology (especially technologies of production, communication, and transformation) and modeled after the machine (examples would be LOOKING BACKWARD or the closing segment of THIGNS TO COME) and social utopianism, which posits the reconstruction of society to achieve a greater degree of social equality (examples might be many of the feminist science fiction novels which appeared in the 1960s). This distinction has some important consequences. The technological utopian tradition, which arose in the late 19th and early 20th century, had serious problems constructing plots. The standard one, which runs from LOOKING BACKWARD to JUST IMAGINE, involves the transportation of a citizen from our present world to this utopian future who may learn about the changes which have occured. Rarely were the technological utopians interested in tracing the PROCESS of change, simply in describing the bold new world of the future. Since this is a utopia, a world without problems, it also becomes a world without drama and often a world without plots. It constitutes a subgenre of what Michel de Certeau calls "spatial narratives," stories which are organized around the movement through or the surveying of space rather than narrative causality. A key image is the awakened sleeper on the balcony surveying future Boston in LOOKING BACKWARD. The social utopians, on the other hand, dealt with the process of change and often began their stories within a world which is struggling to ahcieve utopian goals; it deals with the process of transformation within the characters and the society by which utopia is achieved. Social utopian stories then have access to the range of plot structures characteristic of political fiction more generally. The shift from the Soviet montage films to social utopian stories such as TERMINAL ISLAND or BORN IN FLAMES may not be so great after all. STAR TREK struggles to maintain a ballence between these two traditions, recognizing early on that they attracted different groups of readers and both groups must be interested in order to produce a ratings success. ST has been accused of rejecting dramatic conflict between its characters, a common flaw within utopian fiction, but more often, it merges utopian and dystopian stories by treating the Enterprise as both a technological and a social utopian community, which encounters and transforms dystopian worlds. A vivid example might be the Borg episodes where the technological utopian Enterprise confrontsa cyberpunk dystopian future. So, if we recognize that literary utopian traditions rarely appear in their purest forms in cinema, that social utopianism may allow for the movement from dystopian to utopian worlds within a single narrative (and hence the introduction of conflict and plot) and that these two utopian traditions can be mixed and matched, we can see a wider variety of films as appropriate to a discussion of utopianism in the cinema, including some such as THINGS TO COME, which you cite as dystopian. Hope this helps. Henry Jenkins