Just got this on Blu Ray the other day. Pretty silly movie but with a great soundtrack! (which is apparently very rare) I’d never seen it before but Stigmata is played in it and I knew is was a cyberpunk movie so I figured what the hell…
I gotta give it a recommend because of the cyberpunk sets and visuals. Man I often forget just how much I really like cyberpunk. Just so full of despair with all of that technology just hanging around totally intruding on our lives. It seems like poverty and technology go hand in hand. The sets of Robocop are pretty bad ass too not quite as bleak the Hardware sets though.
It kinda worries me because the genre is dirty, bleak, and disgusting but I find it oddly beautiful.
like Aeon Flux (the cartoon not the crappy movie- fell in love with that chick’s voice btw) was a fantastic cartoon with it’s cyberpunk imagery. (funny you should mention it in another thread Icepick)
Anyway the reason I give it it’s own thread and not put it in the recent movies thread is because I was thinking other people may have a taste for this genre as well and we could a good cyberpunk thread going…
I think TMIATTTT is very cyberpunk sounding. Pretty much anything off of that album could work in that type of movie (except for Test!)
Late,
grmpysmrf
Hardware is a very shitty movie. Its only redeeming qualities are the visuals, which can be quite good, and Carl McCoy, who basically played himself:
Richard Stanley also directed the majority of Nephilim video clips and I even saw him standing around behind the mixing desk at a concert of theirs.
I haven’t seen this movie in many many years, but I will never forget seeing footage of GWAR stuck to Stigmata wtf?? I guess the producers finally came to some sort of agreement with the publishers of 2000 AD from whom the story was allegedly plagiarized. It had a bare bones DVD release a decade ago, but quickly went OOP.
sigh I’m one of Hardware’s few defenders out there. I’m not saying it’s a brilliant master piece or anything but I think it’s got great atmosphere and nice visuals and I guess that’s all I need from that genre. I also like the robot which looks like someone glued a bunch of sharp objects together and pushed it at people, a pleasant change from all the obvious cg crap now days. This was also the flick that introduced me to Ministry when I was a kid. Plus you get a shower scene set to a great PIL song where a guy uses his robot hand to feel up his girlfriend. Whoda thunk the future could be so rad?
sigh I’m one of Hardware’s few defenders out there. I’m not saying it’s a brilliant master piece or anything but I think it’s got great atmosphere and nice visuals and I guess that’s all I need from that genre.
That’s all there is for this genre. The futuristic nomad look is way cool! The Atsmosphere is very cool If cyber punk visuals are done well. It completely creates the atmosphere!
I also like the robot which looks like someone glued a bunch of sharp objects together and pushed it at people.
What a great and funny description!! the little skullhead
was pretty cool looking especially after she painted it to look like the flag.
Late,
grmpysmrf
God, I had this on VHS… I either gave it to charity (which is probably where I got it from in the first place) or it’s sitting in my garage. I dont remember much except typical C-Grade crap and the Ministry/Gwar video lol. Surprised it got a Blu-Ray release.
Blu-ray blu-ray blu-ray… I want to know if Blu-ray is going to die out to another format in the next couple of years a la laserdisc or dominate like DVD. I dont have anything Blu-ray yet, but they do tempt me, still think I’ll hold out for a while longer yet though.
Cyberpunk… I like it. Anyone have any other suggestions, aside from Robocop that is.
I played this awesome DOS game years ago called… DreamWeb. Isometric cyberpunk style adventure type game, pretty cool.
Maybe it wasn’t really that cyberpunk come to think of it… thats just always how it was described… oh well cool game anyway. The SNES game Shadowrun is good too (based on a cyberpunk pen and paper RPG I think).
I just like the work… Cyberpunk. word.
And Steampunk, fuck steampunk sounds cool…
Cyberpunk was at first a literary term to describe the works of a few authors working in the science fiction realm who were considered on the cutting edge. William Gibson, and Bruce Sterling were chief among these. Their collaborative novel The Difference Engine also kick started the whole Steam Punk genre. These were the guys thinking about cyberspace before there really was such a thing. That Gibson wrote his stories on an archaic typewriter was kind of ironic.
Here are some movies off the top of my head that can be considered to have a “cyberpunk” attitude or themes.
Blade Runner - the granddaddy of them all
Videodrome
Akira
Brazil
Johnny Mnemonic (from Gibson’s short story)
Hardware
Ghost In The Shell
Thanks to a Keyboard Magazine article from 1989 that lumped Ministry, Skinny Puppy, Foetus, Severed Heads ect… into the genre there ended up being actual bands inspired by that who set out to make “Cyberpunk” records. Cyberaktif a collaboration by Bill Leeb, cEvin Key, Dwayne Goettel, and Blixa Bargeld is one band that set out to explore cyberpunk themes, and featured in their second article on the movement.
Of course Billy Idol’s album Cyberpunk missed the boat by several years [;)] [:)]
Videodrome is awesome. My VHS of that wore out. (I didnt watch it that much I think it was just a crap quality tape lol).
some steampunk can be in victorian era… The Watchmen is steampunk, it’s kind of like the “future” but still driving around in old skool cars and using clockwork and steam engines and shit.
I was going to say Total Recall was cyberpunk, but then I wasnt quite sure if it fit… suppose it does.
Total Recall just made me think of The Running Man, dunno if that is quite Cyberpunk but some of the villans in that movie are hilarious.
Yeah Total Recall is in everyway Cyberpunk. When Quaid goes into Rekall for a Mars Vacation memory implant and starts foaming at the mouth, now thats fucking Cybernetic punk of the highest order.
Yeah Total Recall is in everyway Cyberpunk. When Quaid goes into Rekall for a Mars Vacation memory implant and starts foaming at the mouth, now thats fucking Cybernetic punk of the highest order.
I’d say running man is very Cyberpunk as well. and at the risk of splitting hairs I think Totall recall fits based on the themes but since an element of it takes place in space and has aliens and what nor running around I’m not sure if it may be better classified as more Sci Fi than actual cyber punk. Although the Dystopian Society and the very intrusive technology is present.
Speaking of SciFi I think the BORG from Star Trek TNG fits into this category beautifully. While I know I’m going back on my “no aliens” from a sentence and a half ago I think if we were to watch that society actually become the “borg,” I think that story would look very cyber punkish.
Late,
grmpysmrf
Yes dont get me started on the Borg. The Borg are the epitome of cyberpunk, remember Locutus.
I’m fascinated by the Borg as well. I can’t believe, with how rabid the fan base is for Star Trek, that there is no back story for the borg. and by no back story I don’t mean those pseudohistory pages that talk about the damage they had done in space back in the 1400’s up until the 2300’s. I mean back story on how they became the borg! I would imagine they would look a lot like Americans and slowly evolve into those dystopian cyberpunk societies until eventually they would become “The Borg”
Late,
grmpysmrf
I think the borg started out as strictly machine or machinery. The Borg Queen herself is an alien assimilated, but then again there might’ve been a race that built the Borg since machines are artificial and couldnt have birthed themselves. The shows dont really go in-depth about the Borg, just the usaul “they spread like a virus through out the galaxy, resistance is futile”. Gene Rodenbary or whatever should start a show strictly on the borg, letting people see the origins of the borg in their point of vi
Well Gene Roddenberry is dead so he can’t start anything but your point is made, his estate is missing a big cash cow. If they were to do a movie called the origins of the Borg or what not and just follow the Borg timeline I would totally dig that and I’m not even a trekkie!
The Borg had to be created. If you look at the effeciency and their quest for “knowledge” it looks very America the way cultures come here and are assimilated, combine that with our thirst simplicity/efficiency through technology and you have the recipe for the Borg
Late,
grmpysmrf
LMAO I didnt know he died… well there goes that idea.
Yup I see the similarities. I would also like to add since the future is now, americans and their iphones/ipods and other cool gadgets we’re already semi-cyborged in a way. A few more years we WILL become fully Borg. lol
LMAO I didnt know he died… well there goes that idea.
He’s been dead damn near 20 years![:)]
Yup I see the similarities. I would also like to add since the future is now, americans and their iphones/ipods and other cool gadgets we’re already semi-cyborged in a way. A few more years we WILL become fully Borg. lol
Oh yeah, as a matter of fact it gets creepier than that with the introduction of “nanobots”
Nanobots are molecular robots that a few scientists/firms are working with/developing and the idea is that they’d be able to inject millions of them into the blood stream and they would make your make your blood/oxygen ratio more efficient. They would also be used to help boost the white cell count in fighting off infections and what not. Very exciting uses assuming it stays altruistic but could you imagine the amount of pain that could be generated if some of those nanobots became corrupted or you had a virus laced batch of bots injected into you. frightening ideas!
Late,
grmpysmrf
Have yet to scope out Hardware, but I really should now. Robots and sex set to great industrial makes me happy.
A Scanner Darkly is pretty fucking cyberpunk when you get right down to it, what with the fact that everyone is under constant surveillance from people with everchanging suits in cahoots with syntetic drug lords.
Steampunk? Only good thing to come out of that was Final Fantasy VI.
