Interesting that one of the main collaborators on the movie, Janusz Kamiński, was Polish.<p>Polish sci-fi from the Cold War period was full of tech dystopia with a dollop of absurdity: Stanislaw Lem is well known in the Western world, Janusz Zajdel less so, but he was no less talented. Even Andrzej Sapkowski, the author of the Witcher, dabbled in SF dystopia in some of his less known stories.<p>It is likely that Janusz Kamiński was influenced by them at least a bit. In Slavic dystopias, you cannot laugh at the tyrant, but you can at least grin at his minions, who are usually as stupid as they are mean.<p>It is nice to notice from here in Central Europe, a tiny thread of a shared Cold War experience in a world class movie that is ostensibly about a very different world.