Here Are The 12 Finest Cyberpunk Movies You Can Watch Right Now:
We can feel good about the future when we watch science fiction movies. A movie that says people will get better is strong because it grants us something to work toward. The “Star Trek” series showed how much greater the world would be if people from different countries learned to live together without fighting.
Some sci-fi predictions came true. For example, Georges Méliès’s 1902 movie A Trip to the Moon portrayed what a possible trip to the moon might be like, more than sixty years before the Apollo 11 mission.
But this isn’t always how science fiction movies are. A lot of people think that the future doesn’t look good. A scary movie about science fiction can be a sign of bad things to come.
In this category, bleak worlds where society is overrun by technology and people are unhappy serve as the backdrop for these movies. Technology like AI, cybernetics, and huge companies show up more often within these types of sci-fi projects compared to other types.
The movie makes a stronger case for why it’s bad to use technology to predict crime because the main character is picked out as a future criminal, but this is only because one of the AI systems fails and gives the wrong information.
Tokyo Gore Police:
This movie is about blood and cops in Tokyo, which is a very big city. Some crazy scientists, called Key Man, have spread a virus that makes people’s bodies turn into strange weapons that they use alongside great violence.
A neo-samurai group, authorized to kill and harm, is employed by the Tokyo police to combat the threat posed by the so-called Engineers. The first fight starts on a city rooftop. In just a few minutes, we witnessed a blade severing an arm and a flying chainsaw inflicting serious injuries to a police officer’s throat and another officer’s mouth.
The police may look tough, but Ruka is the real deal. She uses a rocket gun as a trampoline to get to the roof, where she rips the engineer apart.
This is how Tokyo Gore Police spends the rest of its 110 minutes. The crazy, bloody stuff is all Japanese, but it also borrows from other places, like Paul Verhoeven’s mocking ads within RoboCop as well as Starship Troopers.
Elysium:
A big theme within cyberpunk stories is the difference between rich and poor. People who can help others aren’t always willing to share their resources, just like in real life. If you want to stay safe, Neill Blomkamp’s 2013 science fiction action movie “Elysium” shows how far people with less power have to go.
In the 22nd century, Earth was a desert with too many people living on it. Rich people live in a space station termed “Elysium” that has the latest medical technology and scientific discoveries.
The poor are left to suffer and rot in their dirty world. A chemical on Earth poisons Max Da Costa, a building worker, and kills him. You can only get the cure on elysium.
Max and Julio, his best friend, plan to break into the very safe station. Jessica Delacourt, who is the Defense Secretary of Elysium, finds out about their plan and sends Agent M. Kruger, a bounty hunter, after them.
The Running Man:
Paul Michael Glaser’s future fantasy, like Blade Runner and Akira, is set in the year 2019. A totalitarian state in California, said to be recovering from an economic crash, serves as the backdrop for the story.
Ben Richards, a chopper pilot, is wrongly accused of killing innocent people during a food fight. Soon, Ben is chosen to participate in the famous reality TV show The Running Man. The people who were forced to compete must fight the gladiators, backed by the government, until one of them dies.
The Running Man is centered on a book that Stephen King wrote in 1982 under the name Richard Bachman. One could say that the movie predicts the trends in current TV.
One can also interpret the movie as a satirical critique of the corrupt nature of society and the multitude of individuals who inhabit it. The Running Man, on the other hand, is just an action movie with some good sci-fi parts. The movie doesn’t try to address any political issues; instead, it just shows how brave Arnold is.
Upgrade:
Upgrade excels at using the plot device of “average Joe” men turning into action heroes after their families are killed, surpassing the commonality found in other movies. The chaos starts when Grey, an auto mechanic as well as a human-computer augmentation expert, gets into a crash because his self-driving car doesn’t work right.
The accident happened in an area of town that is known for crime, so thieves attacked and killed his family while paralyzing him. Grey’s ties enable him to acquire a chip called STEM, which enhances all of his movement skills. This lets him go get revenge.
With such a simple story, the movie easily covers all the major cyberpunk themes, such as a society falling apart due to too many crimes and the pros and cons of technology.
There are some small parallels to one of Jean-Claude VanDamme’s well-known films, but Upgrade is different because it’s about paralysis instead of death, and the images are better.
Minority Report:
The Minority Report makes the case that the world would be better off if crimes were never committed in the first place, rather than waiting for them to happen so that the criminals could be punished.
In the year 2054, there is a pre-crime police team that can tell if someone is going to murder someone and stop them before they do. This remains one of Steven Spielberg’s finest movies, and Tom Cruise gives a great performance. The plot is smart, and the action moves quickly.
The movie makes a stronger case for why it’s bad to use technology to predict crime because the main character is picked out as a future criminal, but this is only because one of the AI systems fails and gives the wrong information.
A.I. Artificial Intelligence:
Steven Spielberg’s 2001 cyberpunk movie “A.I. Artificial Intelligence” was a terrible tragedy, even though the concept makes it sound like a joyful family adventure. It’s a story that came from two great movies. The late, great Stanley Kubrick came up with the idea, but he died before he could finish working on the movie.
Before he died, Kubrick gave the project to Spielberg because he thought Spielberg was the only director who could handle the story’s complex computer-generated images. “A.I. Artificial Intelligence” takes place in the 22nd century, when most of the world’s people have died off. People have made androids that look like people but don’t have feelings.
Henry Swinton and Monica Swinton are sad because their son is in a coma. They adopt a robot child named David. David longs for the love of a family but struggles to fit in.
Total Recall:
When it came out, the first Total Recall movie wasn’t a huge hit. But after the 1990s, the movie had a cult following. Many people consider it a sci-fi movie, but certain aspects of the story have a cyberpunk influence.
The movie takes place in the year 2084, in a world where technology is high and traveling through space is common. Douglas Quaid keeps having dreams about Mars and a strange woman.
Then he ends up at the Rekall Center, which is known for giving clients fake memories to make them want them. Quaid’s plan doesn’t work out as planned, and his “real life” isn’t really his own. This movie is a classic and a great example of a sci-fi cyberpunk movie.
Tron:
Cyberpunk isn’t really a part of Steven Lisberger’s sci-fi action show Tron. But it has some cyberpunk features, like a cyberworld that is smart.
The movie is mostly about Kevin Flynn, a brilliant coder who runs his own video game center and does some hacking. Kevin’s goal in hacking is to hurt the reputation of the CEO of ENCOM Software and show that the company stole many of Kevin’s video game programs.
After that, Kevin breaks into the Master Control Program of the company and quickly learns that it is not an easy program. Disney promoted Tron as a big step forward in computer-generated images when it first came out.
Tron’s cyberworld looks old and simple, and the set pieces appear thoughtlessly made. The movie had a lot of ideas that were way ahead of their time. Besides that, it taught a lot of computer terms to many people.
Sleep Dealer:
The Sleep Dealer talked about immigration in the same controversial way a long time before Trump became president. In the future, a wall between Mexico and the US stops all immigration.
Robots now do blue-collar jobs in the United States. It’s interesting that the people who want to move to the U.S. still run the same robots back in Mexico. They do this through a company that hires a lot of people and puts cable nodes in their heads.
This means that Sleep Dealer’s made-up world is perfect for haters and people who don’t like how America welcomes immigrants with open arms since the government can physically keep Mexicans away while still using their skills and cheap labor. Tenoch Huerta as well as Jacob Vargas make cameos early in the movie.
Dredd:
That was a long time ago, before he played Billy Butcher in The Boys, which is one of his best roles. The character lives in Mega-City One, an advanced and chaotic city with 800 million people and 20,000 crimes reported every day.
This means that judges like him can arrest, convict, and kill people. The movie is better than the Sylvester Stallone version from the 1990s because it is based on The Raid.
Like the main character of the well-reviewed action film, Judge Dredd has to fight his way through a high-rise building full of crooks to get to the main bad guy who is selling drugs. He has to put in a lot of work to do this.
Naked Lunch:
These two authors wrote a book called Storming the Reality Studio: A Casebook of Cyberpunk. They said that there probably would not be any cyberpunk without “Naked Lunch.” They were talking about William S. Burroughs’s important Beatnik book from 1959, which David Cronenberg turned into a movie in 1991.
Due to the impossibility of turning horror stories like “Naked Lunch” into a straight movie, Cronenberg incorporated elements from Burroughs’ other works and drew inspiration from his troubled personal life.
The result was a beautifully made movie that employed lighting, set design, and clothes from the time period to bring out the author’s strange point of view. Peter Weller plays the lead role of William Lee, a made-up version of Burroughs.
Lee is an exterminator, and he likes his job, even though his boss tells him off for not having enough poison. When we learn that his wife Joan is employing the bug powder as a painkiller replacement for an IV, the movie loses all semblance of reality and turns into a hazy trip full of insect typewriters as well as strange North African places.
Cyberpunk doesn’t come from a dystopian world; it comes from a dystopian mind. Lee’s skewed view is mostly crazy because he is high on drugs.
Technology controls Lee’s life, just like in other cyberpunk books. In this case, it’s a group of mutant typewriters that change into bug-like shapes and mess with his mind and sense of reality. Weller plays the part perfectly, with a serious charm that rounds out the movie’s unrealistic highs.
The Fifth Element:
Someone has said that The Fifth Element is more of a sci-fi movie with cyberpunk features, or that it isn’t even cyberpunk at all. This argument is mostly about how it handles characters, settings, and ideas that work better in a space opera than a cyberpunk one.
The movie takes place in the year 2263, which is very far in the future. The first scenes depict a cyberpunk version of New York City in the future.
The main reason for this is that the city has grown into a huge pile of skyscrapers that rise above the smog. We consider this movie cyberpunk due to the presence of flying cars and robot waiters. We also adore Luc Besson.
The story of the movie is about an ordinary taxi driver who is very important in the search for a famous rocket weapon. There are many well-known names in this movie, and Gary Oldman as well as Chris Tucker give standout performances.
An absolutely amazing movie with bright colors that make orange stand out. There is no denying that Luc Besson has a great eye for filmmaking in this huge show.
Johnny Mnemonic:
William Gibson himself wrote the story for Robert Longo’s Johnny Mnemonic, which is a fun piece of sci-fi trash. This was one of Gibson’s first scripts. It was based on his own short story.
The story takes place in a perfect cyberpunk future world where people’s brains are used to store huge amounts of data by a society run by corporations. Keanu Reeves portrays Johnny. He has a neural device in his brain that lets him store raw information.
Johnny agrees to a data upload that makes his brain hurt. After that, he has to race against time to save himself and fight made-up bad guys. The actors in Johnny Mnemonic are very interesting. They are Takeshi Kitano, Dolph Lundgren, and Udo Kier.
But neither the people nor the events have much meaning. A chance was lost. This idea has so much promise to lead to a much more interesting movie. Still, even though some parts aren’t very good, it’s still fun to watch.
Finch:
A lot of Tom Hanks films came out during the COVID-19 outbreak, but most people didn’t pay attention to them. The war drama Greyhound as well as the Western News of the World are both great choices. Finch is also a great choice; it’s about an old person who survives the end of the world and teaches his robot to take care of his dog after he dies.
In a genre where movies usually just give broad information, Finch gives a lot of specifics. For example, he tells the audience that temperatures have reached 150 °F because of a solar flare that killed the ozone layer and made the world a huge wasteland. The main character is only able to stay alive because he lives in a lab underground.
In addition to talking about climate change, the film is still important because it shows some of the good things about A.I. He taught his humanoid robot a lot about how to take care of dogs so that it could do the job after he died.
Alita:
Sometimes a movie’s cast is more important than its story, and Alita: Battle Angel is one of those movies. The movie is about a robot who wants to find out about her past. James Cameron directed the movie, which stars Christopher Waltz and Mahershalla Ali, among others.
Even though the story has some problems, there aren’t many times when you want to yawn. This is because the actors are so good. Along with everything Cameron does, Alita is a beautiful work of art that mixes CGI and live-action film. Besides that, the songs are great because they go well alongside the exciting action scenes and the conversation.
