Science fiction movies

BaldFriede wrote: This "Cyberpunk" label seems to me pretty much like "Alter Wein in neuen Schluchen" ("old wine in new skins"), meaning it is nothing but a marketing label. These kind of dystopian scenarios have been around a long time before Gibson and his Neuromancer (which is very overrated as a book, by the way; I read it and did not find it remarkable at all). Stanislaw Lem preceded him by a decade at least. Philip K. Dick was ahead of him too.

So far, I think cyberpunk is some sort of mixture between ruined, rusted future, with humanity turned into scavengers, 80's hair, 80's look; but then again, people say that Ghost in the shell also fits... subgenres are fiction anyway.

You also have Yvgeny Zamyatin's We, lots of H.G. Wells stories, as well as Huxley's Brave New World which took ideas (or shares similarities to) from:

Wells's Men Like Gods (1921) and The Sleeper Awakes (1910 - a rewrite of When the Sleeper Wakes (1899))
Zamyatin's We (1921) (which apparently Huxley hadn't read when he wrote Brave New World)
D.H. Lawrence
Plus it apparently bears a similarity to philosopher Bertrand Russell's The Scientific Outlook (1931).

I just read the Wikipedia article about Cyberpunk and found the following sentence:

   The police station of Blade Runner is the perfect copy (angle of sight included) of one of  the         gothic skyscrapers of Fritz Lang's Metropolis, the earliest cyberpunk reference.

So my assessment of Metropolis seems to be correct.

i'm suspicious of the term too

it makes action movies like Johnny Mnemonic cyberpunk too ;P

BaldJean wrote: I don't quite know what is meant by "Cyberpunk". from the mentioning of  movies by 1800iareyay it looks as if all movies in which androids appear fall under "Cyberpunk". I can certainly see the "Cyber" element there, but where please is the "punk" in those movies?

Cyberpunk are the types of movies that are baes in a grim, sometimes near or post apocaliptic future where technology si constatly in your face and has changed the way human interact. Emotions become more and more strange as humans become more and more robotics. Usually the world is dominated by big corporations and the heroe is the outcast (usually a hacker).

A good example in movies is Blade Runner and in literature the Neuromander by William Gibson, which is rumored its being finally made to a movie, directed by Chris Cunningham

He was, Jody, but he also appeared in Demolition Man uncredited, apparently.

Or Sandra Bullock...

Hmm, with different actors in it, it could have been a whole different kettle of Zeuhl.

I've not seen it in ages, but Demolition Man wasn't that bad, even if it did have Sly Stallone in it.

el b�thy wrote: As far as genre goes, nobody has expressed much love/hate for the subgerens of sci fi... What do you think of... Cyberpunk? There... that should bring back some discussion

Cyberpunk is my personal favorite. The Matrix, Blade Runner, Minority Report, and Robocop are some of my favorite films. I find that it's generally the most thought-provoking of sci-fi subgenres. Films like 2001 are the exception, but for the most part philosophy is found here.

There are some SF-books I wold like to see a movie made of, especially by Stanislaw Lem. One is his "Memoirs found in a Bathtub". According to what Lem said in an interview of his, a German TV-team made a movie of it, but I have never seen it; it is not listed in the International Movie Database either. Lem didn't like the movie; he said it was a lot of crap.
Another book of Lem which I can imagine as a movie is "Eden".