One of my favorites genres and it seem's this particular niche movie type really excelled in the 70's, was it all thanks to Nixon, why was the 1970's so damm good for this type of movie and the surrounding decades so bad.
The Conservation
Three days of the condor
The Parallax View
Rollerball
The Andromeda Strain
Marathon Man
Capricorn One
to name a few,
Cause those type of movies just kick so much ass and are pretty hard to screw up imo.
shareA lot of science fiction with bad outcomes in the 1950s -- Them!, Godzilla, and various others which are always attributed to paranoia about nuclear weapons.
Some of the films you mention deal in political paranoia, which ties in with either Nixon/Watergate or the CIA and the use of intelligence agencies for political revolution.
I think one incidental reason you got a lot of near-future dystopian science fiction (2001, Rollerball, THX 1138, Logan's Run) was the fairly abrupt changes and trends in "modern" interior design and architecture made depicting the near future a lot easier, as well as making it more real by using actual locations, commercial furniture, etc.
What's kind of interesting is that in some ways the future was a dystopia, but it worked anyway -- Rollerball may have been a dystopia, but it sure looked like everyone had a job and access to consumer goods. Not all were like this, but even some of the darker ones looked better even if it was a devil's bargain.
People started to wake up in the seventies but then they went back to sleep in the eighties.
shareA large portion of the population was hip to the fact that the government can't be trusted.
shareYes
shareThere was no CGI back in that Era to ruin these Masterpiece movies you've listed
share