In the 2017 depicted by Fortress, Earth is an overcrowded, resource-depleted wasteland governed by a military dictatorship. To combat catastrophic overpopulation, a global one-child policy is strictly enforced, making unauthorized second pregnancies a high-level criminal offense. This societal collapse has led to the privatization of justice, where the Men-Tel Corporation operates the "Fortress," a high-tech, 33-story underground prison designed to dehumanize and exploit inmates as slave labor for corporate expansion.

The film’s vision of 2017 centers on a surveillance-industrial complex where humans are treated as corporate assets. Technology is leveraged for absolute behavioral control: inmates are implanted with "intestinators"—nanotech devices that induce excruciating pain or death if a prisoner crosses a designated perimeter. The facility is overseen by Zed-10, an omniscient AI that monitors daily activity, and Director Poe, a human-cyborg hybrid born and raised by the corporation, highlighting a future where identity is entirely subsumed by corporate ownership.

While the real 2017 did not feature a literal 33-story underground desert pit for expectant parents, the film accurately signaled the rise of the private prison industry and the expansion of the prison-industrial complex. The movie's "intestinators" find a modern, though less lethal, parallel in GPS ankle monitors and biometric tracking used for parolees. Furthermore, the dream-monitoring technology portrayed in the film—where Zed-10 reads and records neural activity to detect dissent—mirrors contemporary anxieties regarding predictive algorithms and the harvesting of private cognitive data by major tech entities. Although the one-child policy was a clear reference to 20th-century Chinese law, its application in the film as a global western standard remains a dramatic sci-fi exaggeration rather than a realized geopolitical outcome.