Cyberpunk is my favorite genre of sci-fi, and I definitely found it via movies and TV, so I’m wondering what everyone’s favorite pieces of media out there?
Some of my tops are of course the classics like Blade Runner, Akira, Robocop, and Dredd
I think one of the earliest reasons I fell in love with Cyberpunk was Batman Beyond. That theme song also totally deeply influenced my music taste.
What about yall?
I like Blade Runner (and 2049) a lot, but I always felt like they put much more emphasis on the ‘cyber’ part then the ‘punk’ part.
Not much commentary on socioeconomic issues, or engagement with themes of anti-athoritarianism and anti-capitalism, or the dystopian nature of the world, all of that is just background dressing to a much more standard science fiction exploration of “what it means to be human”, which is something I could find better explored in classic golden age science fiction like Isaac Asimov’s Robot and Foundation series, like Caves of Steel.
That’s why, out of all visual media, it’s really Cyberpunk: Edgerunners and Robocop that made the genre click for me, believe it nor. It’s the former that made me finally go out and get all the cyberpunk literature I could and start reading it. That’s probably informed by my queer, anarchist, and punk leanings outside of cyberpunk, you know?
Blade Runner hits those themes, but it pushes the discussion around Replicants, which are stand-ins for The Others in society. Those movies don’t hit the POV of street level, which is different than most cyberpunk works.
I was going to say. All the cyberpunk stuff exists in Blade Runner, but because the pov characters are a Cop hunting replicants and the Replicants themselves we only see it in the periphery.
To be fair to Blade Runner here, I don’t think it was really made to be “Cyberpunk”. It has some of the themes and inspired a lot of future Cyberpunk work (at the very least aesthetic wise), but the book “Cyberpunk” wasn’t published until a year later and “Neuromancer” didn’t come out until two years later, so a lot of the themes that we consider Cyberpunk weren’t fully realised yet. I guess you could argue it’s more proto-Cyberpunk (and a number of other sci-fi from before then), but it’s pretty firmly entrenched as Cyberpunk now, and to be honest, I don’t really disagree either. Strict definitions for genres are pretty tricky, even more so for foundational work like I’d say Blade Runner was.
I didn’t mention it but yeah Edgerunners hit SO hard and is also one of my favorites. It really showed the people on the outskirts being ground down by the system aspect of the genre. It also helps that it was an absolutely gorgeously made Anime.
Not much commentary on socioeconomic issues, or engagement with themes of anti-athoritarianism and anti-capitalism, or the dystopian nature of the world, all of that is just background dressing
People see themes differently. IMO the movie was dripping with socioeconomic commentary: the difference between the beauty of the inside of the archology versus the shitty streets; Pris resorting to prostitution (I’m pretty sure that happened, but I haven’t seen the movie in a while); Deckard’s shitty living quarters.
I don’t know if the dystopian nature of the world needs deeper exploration. It’s shown to be awful (at least to red-meat eating Americans from the 1980s). The constant rain/umbrellas seem like a pretty clear nod to acid rain. The crumbling city and infrastructure are pretty apparent. The closing sequence of Deckard escaping to the green wilds seems kind of ham fisted, but it underlines that the system the city represents is awful.
