Released in 1995 (the same year as Hackers and The Net!) and I've never heard of this movie. I think it was direct-to-video though, and there are plenty of terrible direct-to-video movies from that time.

Here's a description of the movie from someone's review on imdb: > An evil billionaire develops a weapon that will entrap its victims in a catatonic state of virtual reality. His girlfriend steals the disk (back when DVD discs were considered a big deal) that creates the software for the weapon and amazingly, it's the only copy. She makes friends with a sailor who helps her escape, and they put the software in a tattoo on his back.

Here's a trailer. If you think you can stomach it, the entire movie has been posted to youtube. For what it's worth, one of the reviews says there's a lot of nudity in the movie but I guess it isn't enough to trigger youtube's algorithm for removal. I think it's a little too low-budget even for my tastes so I haven't tried watching but maybe someone here might be interested.

Slyth is a movie about a group of high-tech low-lifes who happen to be the best e-sports team for some virtual reality first-person shooter. All of the establishing shots over the city show that the movie takes place in a cyberpunk world, but the plot is actually about the team hitting someone with their car which gives that person amnesia. They bring him to their house to help him, he falls in love with the main character, and then joins the e-sports team because (of course) he's a natural at this VR game he's never played before.

Now, because they're the best e-sports team ever, they're given an opportunity to beta test some new VR game. Unfortunately, that "VR game" is actually a portal into a different dimension. And then the lizard people show up.

This movie was made in Thailand, so I assume the exaggerated overacting is just part of Thai cinema. And everyone in the movie is a beautiful twenty-something, which gives it a very "young adult" feel. This isn't a dark and gritty noir, it's a fun action romp. The CGI and production value are pretty good though. It doesn't feel like a big budget American movie, but it doesn't feel like some small indie Thai movie either. Overall, the setting may be cyberpunk, but the themes and plot aren't. I've definitely seen worse movies, but I don't know if I'd call that a recommendation.

Here's a trailer, although I warn you, it spoils a lot of the movie. The lizard people don't show up until half-way through the movie yet this trailer makes it seem like a war with the lizard people is the entire plot. You can watch it on Netflix though, and I'm always a sucker for more cyberpunk content.

I've been thinking about Gamer for a while and I've been hesitant to post about it because it really is a bad movie. But I also think it firmly falls into the cyberpunk category. So here we are.

The movie is about a company that invents some new technology which allows you to remotely control other humans. They use this technology to make a new reality TV show where death-row inmates fight to the death for the chance at a pardon. So similar to Running Man, except here the inmates are remotely controlled by teenage video gamers. And while that makes absolutely no sense, that's the story they went with.

However, there's a subplot with a second TV show (or just video game?) run by the same company, and this game is called Society. Society is basically The Sims except you're controlling real people who get paid to be avatars. This is where the movie goes off the deep-end with social commentary and it isn't subtle.

Because this woman signs up to be a character: !

And ends up being controlled by this guy: !

And that goes about as well as you'd expect. So the plot points are already unsettling but the movie goes out of their way to make it as disgusting as they can.

Anyway, eventually it's revealed that the CEO of the company wants to use his technology to mind-control everyone and only Gerard Butler can stop him. It's a very strange movie and if it didn't try so hard to be gross I feel like it could've been a good movie.

Here's a trailer. You can watch it on Tubi.

All of Philip K. Dick's writings pre-date cyberpunk as a genre but were very influential in the creation of cyberpunk. So he represents a proto-cyberpunk period in time. Also, most of his books are about drug use and questioning reality.

When his books are only used as the foundation of a movie, amazing things can happen (Blade Runner, Minority Report, Total Recall). But when you create a faithful adaptation of his works it always ends up... kinda weird. A Scanner Darkly follows its source material very closely. So even though the movie was made in 2006, it really represents a proto-cyberpunk point in time. And it's all about taking drugs and questioning reality.

The movie has big-name actors (Keanu Reeves, Robert Downey Jr, Woody Harrelson, Winona Ryder) but the majority of the movie is just a bunch of junkies sitting around their house being weird. The rotoscoping animation style is really cool (and used to great effect here) but it isn't enough to get me to care about the story. I don't know, I guess I'd call this movie interesting but I'm not sure if it's good.

Here's a trailer. I don't think it's streaming anywhere though.

Jodie Foster, Dave Bautista, Charlie Day, Jeff Goldblum… and yet very few people have heard of this movie. It definitely takes place in a cyberpunk world, but most of it is seen from within the "Hotel", which is actually a hospital for criminals. Definitely check it out if you've never seen it.

Here's a trailer. You can watch it on Max and Hoopla.

I was originally going to ask whether you consider Running Man to be cyberpunk or not. But then I figured, that's a stupid question, of course it is. Just look at how they depicted Los Angeles: !

We can argue whether or not it's a good movie, but it's definitely cyberpunk.

I was just thinking this movie has a police state with a small rebellion rather than a megacorporation that didn't care about human life. Typically, I would say it's just dystopian fiction if the nation is run by a police state and it's cyberpunk if the nation is run by megacorporations. But that's probably too narrow a view when everything else in this movie fits a cyberpunk setting. Especially a game show that doesn't care about human life.

Anyway, here's a trailer. You can watch it on Pluto or Hoopla.

This is different from the video series that was posted earlier. This is a feature-length cyberpunk movie from 2014 that flew under the radar:

• https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Aut%C3%B3mata
• https://www.imdb.com/title/tt1971325/

I usually post yewtu.be links, but Inviduous server IP addresses are currently being denied by Google. So your experience may be degraded if you don't have an adblock. (Er... I mean "the corpos are attacking cyberspace relays, so plug in your defensive ice, choom!") Anyway, here's the full movie:

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=AdxL9r3Wx_g

While it might be hard to tell, I do try to find something to say about each post. If it's an obscure cyberpunk work, I'll try to describe it. If I think the work is more well-known, I'll try to ask a question to start a discussion. I do my best not to just go "hey, 'member Blade Runner??" and "hey, 'member Ghost in the Shell?" because I can't think of anything to really discuss about those.

But, I give up. I've got nothing on this one. 'member Strange Days?? It's a great movie. (and yes, I'm referencing an old South Park episode here.) !

Here's a trailer for Strange Days. You can watch it on Max.

> It’s 2041 and the gaps in social and economic inequality have left the world on the brink. A breakthrough in science has given humanity the ability to bring victims of a violent crime back to life by backing up their brain every 2 days. This allows an ambitious, young detective the opportunity to solve a case of a murdered couple when the restoration team is able to bring one of them back.

Czech Blade Runner + Minority Report

--==J 0 H N N Y M N 3 M 0 N 1 C==--

"One more run, Johnny..."

"SNATCH BACK YOUR BRAIN, ZOMBIE!!! SNATCH IT BACK AND HOLD IT!!!"

"Hit me!"

"What's going on, Ralphie? This sounds like a blown deal, man!"

"I WANT to get online... I NEED a computer!!!"

"Initiate the virus!"

"I could crash you from here, man! Wipe out your entire fucking board!"

"Information overload! All the electronics around you poisoning the airwaves! Technological fucking civilization! But we still have all this shit. Because we can't live without it..."

With:

• a young Keanu Reeves in his underwear,
• Ice-T,
• Henry Rollins,
• Dina Meyer
• Dolph Lundgren,
• and "Beat" Takeshi Kitano.

Screenplay by William Gibson

Featuring Turkish subtitles, to evade copyright strikes from the corporate bots that are continually prowling cyberspace! Jack in to your portable network device, and stream this data straight to your in-skull neural network! ...if you have the memory for it...

Mute definitely takes place in a cyberpunk setting, but something about it just feels off to me. Maybe it's the fact that the main character is basically Amish, or that the plot isn't especially cyberpunk, or that I just don't like Paul Rudd's character in this movie. I guess I'm stuck wondering why they bothered to set this movie in a cyberpunk world since they didn't really utilize it in any way. I won't say it's a bad movie, but it's just not for me.

What do you think? Did you enjoy Mute? Would you consider it cyberpunk?

Here's a trailer. You can watch it on Netflix.

It's always been strange to me that Ghost in the Shell is considered cyberpunk. It's about a government agency trying to resolve state-level issues. There are no hard-boiled detectives, no evil corporations, no punk-rock influences, no high-tech low-lifes.

And this isn't unique to Ghost in the Shell either. Lots of classic cyberpunk anime was centered around people working for the government or law enforcement. Appleseed is about a team in the military, Armitage III is about a police officer, Bubblegum Crisis was technically about vigilantes but they worked closely with the police, even modern cyberpunk anime like Psycho Pass centers around a police force. I'll admit Akira starts out with a group of punk biker gangs but it quickly pivots to a story about secret government experiments.

The only thing that really links all those anime to the "cyberpunk" label is the presence of androids and the question of what it means to be human. It doesn't seem to include any of the other aspects of cyberpunk that are typically associated with the more "American" version of cyberpunk. That's not a bad thing by any means, I'm just surprised the Japanese version of cyberpunk didn't end up with its own unique subgenre name since it seems to have evolved from a different set of influences and desires.

And then I discovered Burst City. Burst City was released in 1982 and is heavily influenced by punk-rock culture, to the point that the movie shows entire performances from actual Japanese punk bands. It's an angry, fast-moving, middle-finger to conventional Japanese cinema (with their "cohesive plots" and "story structure").

Any narrative you might expect to find here is pretty thin. If you can say the movie is about anything, it's about a group of punks living in a future dystopian Tokyo who clash with the battle police. And I can see how this movie would fit into the same category as American cyberpunk. It's high-tech low-lifes trying to survive in a dystopian city.

Burst City actually kicked off a small movement of similar movies like Death Powder, Tetsuo: The Iron Man, 964 Pinocchio, and Electric Dragon 80.000V. They're all crazy, kinetic scifi which ignore conventional trends. I'm not saying they're good movies (they're actually pretty hard to watch) but I can see how they fit the "cyberpunk" label more than most "cyberpunk" anime. They are actually punk. If you've never seen any of these movies, I think this video is a good introduction.

Anyway, here's the trailer for Burst City. Of course, being an obscure Japanese movie from the 80s, Burst City isn't streaming anywhere. But also due to being an obscure Japanese movie from the 80s, it's been posted in full to youtube.

It's a bit of a spoiler to say the movie ends with a solarpunk world, but that's like saying "there's a happy ending" is a spoiler. You know they're going to resolve the conflict, it's finding how they get there that's the interesting part.

Also, I do like how a cyberpunk world is basically presented as the worst possible scenario and a solarpunk world is considered the best possible scenario. Personally, that's the only way solarpunk makes sense to me, as a "and they lived happily ever after" world. Solarpunk, to me, feels like an ideal, an end goal. It isn't a setting for a book/movie in my opinion since if there was conflict, I don't think it'd be considered solarpunk. But that's all my ignorant opinion, I'm no expert on solarpunk.

Anyway, this is primarily a time travel movie that spends most of its time in a desolate wasteland future trying to fix the cyberpunk present. I just like how it included both cyberpunk and solarpunk visuals. I should probably point out the bottom-half of the poster isn't my idea of a solarpunk world, that's the desolate wasteland future part of the movie.

I had originally watched this on Hulu and I know it had been available on Amazon Prime, but it seems the corporate overlords aren't interested in streaming this movie this month so it's only available on Hoopla right now. Oh, and here's a trailer.

If you haven't seen Space Sweepers, definitely check it out. It's a fun "cyberpunk in space" Korean movie. It's pretty light-hearted (no deep philosophical discussions here) but it really hits on all the cyberpunk tropes.

Here's a trailer. You can watch it on Netflix.

2047: Virtual Revolution is about a cyberpunk world where 75% of humanity spends all their time in virtual reality. A group of terrorists are killing people who are logged in, so a giant corporation hires a trench-coat wearing private investigator to put a stop to it.

This is definitely a low-budget movie with a bunch of no-name actors, but as a cyberpunk movie, I thoroughly enjoy it. They know they're making a cyberpunk movie and lean into it.

Here's a trailer. It's streaming on Amazon Prime.

What kids movies would you consider to be cyberpunk? That is, not cyberpunk movies that happen to lack adult themes (like maybe Tron) but movies that are intentionally marketed towards kids and happen to be cyberpunk?

The best I can think of would be Astro Boy, Next Gen, or maybe Ron's Gone Wrong. Obviously I'm using a broad definition of "cyberpunk" here considering these are kids movies. The hero really has to "win" in a kids movie so you can't have some nihilistic world where the evil corporations can't be stopped.

Astro Boy spends a lot of time in the floating city above the clouds, but he also spends some time in the wasteland on the ground. The setting seems pretty cyberpunk, but the plot involves the military trying to capture Astro Boy, which isn't as cyberpunk in my opinion.

Next Gen is probably the most cyberpunk of these three. The main character even has an origami unicorn keychain on her backpack. I don't think it's crazy to see that as a Blade Runner reference. Plus, this movie has an evil corporation as the villain, rather than the military.

Ron's Gone Wrong might be a bit of a stretch here. Like Next Gen, it involves an evil corporation that needs to be stopped, but the rest of the world isn't nearly as futuristic/scifi.

What other kids movies do you think might be considered cyberpunk? Big Hero 6 takes place in San Fransokyo which is... kinda cyberpunk. And Ralph Breaks The Internat goes to cyberspace which is... kinda cyberpunk. Any others?

Elysium hits all the themes of a cyberpunk movie. It has high-tech low-lifes, it has corporations in total control, it has a massive inequality gap, it has technology leading to dehumanization. But what it doesn't have, is neon-lit rainy streets at night.

Cyberpunk as a genre has themes that don't rely on visuals and yet so many cyberpunk stories use the 80s aesthetic as a short-hand for "cyberpunk". I think this makes the cyberpunk "look" feel dated even though its themes aren't actually stuck in the 80s.

This video does a great job of breaking down where cyberpunk came from. It was a product of the 1980s. Specifically (in America), the cultural fears of rising crime rates, removing regulations on corporations, and the rising influence of Japan. These were things people worried about in the 1980s and cyberpunk was able to tap into those fears by taking them to the extreme. And while some of those fears were well-founded (removing regulations on corporations), not all aspects of them remained timeless.

Elysium replaces the cultural fears of the 1980s with the cultural fears of the 2010s. Climate change, access to health care, increasing wealth gap. These things are now taken to the extreme while still following the cyberpunk template. I wish more stories were able to separate the 1980s aesthetic from the themes of cyberpunk. The themes of the genre are still relevant today even if the "look" has become dated.

If you haven't seen it, here's a trailer. And it's currently streaming on Netflix.

I would describe The Kitchen as pre-cyberpunk or cyberpunk-lite. It's very close to taking place in a cyberpunk world, but set maybe 5-10 years before the world truly turns cyberpunk.

The main character lives in a slum in London. That slum is 100% a cyberpunk setting. Futuristic advertisements everywhere, horrible poverty, yet access to various scifi technology. However, as soon as the main character leaves the slum, it's only a near-future world. The main character has an entry-level position and is saving money to afford a one-bedroom apartment and leave the slum. The very fact that an entry-level position can allow for vertical social mobility tells me this isn't quite a cyberpunk world.

The plot of the movie is this guy, who has been taught repeatedly his entire life to only look out for himself, learns an old acquaintance has died. That acquaintance has left behind a son who is now all alone. So he's torn between not wanting the kid to be alone while also not truly wanting to trust or protect this kid. You'd think over the course of the movie he'd learn to love the kid and then there'd be this big moment of self-sacrifice at the end, but that isn't where the movie goes.

If anything, this movie feels more "slice of life" because very few plot threads are even resolved. If this was an extended pilot to a new series I'd be interested in watching more. But having the movie end where it does just leaves me wondering why I even bothered watching it. I'm not a fan of "slice of life" stories though so that probably says more about me than the movie. Overall, the movie is good, I just wish it had a better-defined beginning, middle, and end.

You can watch it now on Netflix.

I'm not going to claim this is a fantastic movie, I'm only saying it isn't as bad as the title would suggest. Because with a name like 'iBoy' I would expect it to be much worse.

It's about a teenager who gets shot in the head while using his cellphone. The bullet lodges cellphone shrapnel into his brain and gives him magical control over all electronics. So he becomes a vigilante to stop the local gangs.

So yes, while you do have to shut off your brain and suspend all disbelief, 'iBoy' is such a stupid title I would've thought it'd be an even dumber movie. Plus, I liked the augmented reality visuals when he used his powers.

The movie is on Netflix, so you can go watch it right now!

Visually, it doesn't look very cyberpunk (no neon lights in the rain at night) but it's about a detective and her android partner tracking down an android who appears to have free will. So thematically, it looks like it might be cyberpunk.