applecinnabun

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game dev/sk8r grrl/guitar/flute/tree liker/indie game obsesser/basic autumn bitch. working on hoptix!

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people who know more than me about cyberpunk as a genre: what are some of the must-watch movies?

i've always thought the aesthetic was cool (like everyone else) but the actual genre has always just sort of been at the periphery for me, and i've been wanting to get to know it better. i watched blade runner (1982) and... did not care for that lol. obviously the set design is super cool but the misogyny/orientalism was so overt that it left me surprised i've seen people even bothering to discuss those aspects of it. doesn't take reading an essay to notice that stuff lmao. (although admittedly, "is a person still a person even if their memories are fake" is a more interesting question than most stuff that cops the cyberpunk aesthetic bothers to ask, that was cool too)

anyway that's p much the extent of my experience (unless you count like, ghostrunner, which slaps). are there movies i might like more? am i going about this wrong and cyberpunk is better experienced through books, tabletop games, video games instead of movies? possible i incorrectly assumed this was a film-centric thing. gimme your thoughts!


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in reply to @applecinnabun's post:

It's not strictly a Cyberpunk movie, but Streets of Fire is an American movie that kind of bombed in America but it was hugely popular in Japan. Its success in Japan inspired a lot of the "city hunter" type aesthetics in Japan's 80s that would define what western Cyberpunk took inspiration from later. Kind of a circular ring of inspiration.

Escape from New York is another one that's kind of in the same boat, and is more cyberpunk but not to the extent that we think of as Cyberpunk today.

If neither of those really scratch your curiosity, the Ghost in the Shell anime movies are superb, especially Innocence. https://youtu.be/47aU7CiX7lQ

still interested in the others, but i ended up watching ghost in the shell (1995) and innocence tonight. loved both, thank you :3

i feel like a lot of stuff that splashes cyberpunk or more generally transhumanist aesthetic just kind of stops at "can machines hypothetically be people??" (yes) or "are you still you in a different body?" (yes) but both those movies did a lot of way more fun philosophizing about stuff that i was really into.

Glad you liked them! The Ghost in the Shell TV anime from 2002, Stand Alone Complex, is also pretty good. It's sort of a "villain of the week" setup with an overarching storyline, but the philosophical stuff is still there, especially when it comes to the Tachikomas--one-seater autonomous tanks, with advanced AI that begin to show hints of personhood as time goes on, adding another layer to the "can machines be people" question.

Akira is always a good one, though it's definitely more "punk" than "cyber," if that makes sense. It deals a lot with the big-city oppressive-government themes that cyberpunk works tend to lean into.

There's also Tetsuo, the Iron Man. It doesn't really fit in with most modern cyberpunk stuff, but it asks the same questions of "how much humanity do we lose if we mechanically augment our bodies?"

Also, I haven't played it, but I've heard good things about the cyberpunk TTRPG Lancer!