Daily Archives: April 3, 2017

Scarlett Johansson Ghost in the Shell. Photograph: Jasin Boland/AP

Code streams across a computer screen; hackers bark at each other in techno-jargon and hammer at keyboards; the real world seamlessly shifts into the virtual, and back again. This is the sort of scene that is instantly recognisable as a cyberpunk film, the subgenre of sci-fi that meshes together technology and counterculture of which Ghost in the Shell, the live-action remake of the Japanese anime classic, is the latest high-profile example.

It is little surprise that cyberpunk has proved irresistible for many film-makers over the decades since the term was coined, by the author Bruce Bethke, in the early 1980s. With its visions of postapocalyptic futures, advanced technologies and virtual realms, they get to pack their films with visual effects to sweeten the (red) pill, while wrestling with weighty existential themes.

Yet, for all its enduring popularity which owes so much to Ridley Scotts 1982 classic Blade Runner cyberpunk has often proved a tough nut to crack on the big screen. Even the author William Gibson, a founding father of the genre on the page, struggled to bring its dystopian charms to the cinema. Gibsons first significant foray into film came in 1995 with Johnny Mnemonic an adaptation of his short story about a data courier with a chip implanted in his head and was an confused and poorly received flop, even if it did feature psychic dolphins. Gibson described the film as two animals in one skin constantly pulling in multiple directions.

He had identified a problem that would plague many cyberpunk films thereafter. A decade before Johnny Mnemonic was released, Gibson had written Neuromancer, a genre-defining novel that thrust readers into a noirish dystopia. Neuromancer, published in 1984, came at a time of change. Computers were yet to become ubiquitous, and a strange subculture of phreaks and hackers was brewing. Slowly, governments were realising that the kids tinkering in their bedrooms with soldering irons and motherboards could be capable of disrupting the status quo. Technology was becoming threatening, and even political. In short, great material for screenplays.

However, the resulting films over the last two decades have varied in quality, to say the least. The biggest hit at the box office has been the Wachowskis Matrix trilogy for which a controversial reboot is being planned. Then there are curios, like Abel Ferraras New Rose Hotel (based on another Gibson novel), which starred Christopher Walken, Willem Dafoe and Asia Argento. Theres Wim Wenders postapocalyptic odyssey Until the End of the World (five hours, if you manage to see out the directors cut), and Kathryn Bigelows Strange Days, a critically divisive film that explored the impact of virtual reality. More recently, weve had Carleton Ranneys lo-fi slow-burner Jackrabbit and David Cronenbergs unsettling short, The Nest. Cyberpunk has come to the small screen, too: Mr Robot is a modern incarnation, as was the TV show Orphan Black.

In truth, cyberpunk themes existed in film long before the phrase did. Fritz Langs 1927 film Metropolis envisaged wealthy elites, oppressed masses and a unnerving fusion of woman and machine all themes explored in the remake of Ghost in the Shell. That lineage can be traced through to Blade Runner, based on Philip K Dicks 1968 novel Do Androids Dream of Electric Sheep?, which was set in a smog-filled futuristic LA, dominated by the Tyrell Corporation, where Harrison Fords retired cop hunts replicant cyborgs while musing on humanitys metaphysical quandaries.

A turning point for cyberpunk in film came from an in 1988, with Katsuhiro tomos landmark anime Akira. A fusion of rebellious youth culture and groundbreaking animation, its story of teenage biker gangs in a postapocalyptic Tokyo became an international cult hit. The film paved the way for a wave of animations for adults that peaked in 1998 with Ghost in the Shell. That films arresting visuals, existential questions and a pared back, cat-and-mouse narrative was unlike anything audiences had seen before.

Crucial to cyberpunk is a countercultural take on social issues, albeit often viewed though a Hollywood lens. As Iain Softley, the director of the tongue-in-cheek 1995 thriller Hackers, says: As far a cyber culture is concerned, it is this mixture of technological culture with underground movements. That appeals to younger audiences and that is also the appeal for film-makers.

Hackers, he says, was never about the technology. It was about the popular culture that it generated.

But how do film-makers ensure that the genre remains cutting edge? The remake of Ghost in the Shell, directed by Rupert Sanders, will be the first big-budget outing for cyberpunk since the Matrix films. Guillaume Rocheron, who worked on the film as a visual effects supervisor, says that while the original animation was a key source, the makers took a lot of inspiration from glitch art, various art installations inspired the architecture.

Rocheron explains that the films solograms (Solid volumetric projections of people and advertisements you see in our city shots) required them to develop a new camera system. This is a common feature of cyberpunk films: the pioneering of visual effects technologies to create new worlds, such as the bullet-time technique that was developed for The Matrix.

In todays increasingly technology-driven world where our work depends on connectivity, our leisure on social networks, our economy on digital information cyberpunk remains more pertinent than ever. News headlines are dominated by email hacks, the growing clout of mega-corporations, and rapid developments in AI and virtual reality. Cyberpunk remains a genre that pushes the boundaries, opening audiences eyes to the intersection of technology and humanity and the blurring lines between artificial and organic intelligence. The questions about what makes something real and who exactly is in control are left to us to work out.

See the original post here:

Digital love: why cinema can't get enough of cyberpunk - The Guardian (blog)

Space opera may be the current king of the science fiction filmic landscape, and post-apocalyptic mayhem tends to rule the darker parts of the genre. But nothing beats Cyberpunk when it comes to impact on andrelevance to our current society. The termcoined by writer Bruce Bethke as the title for his 1980 short story Cyberpunk (first published in 1983)immediately evokes images of grungy urban decay coupled with highly advanced, though often misused, technology. Stories in the cyberpunk genre are often referred to as high tech low life, and tend to make for some excellent films.

Writer William Gibson is often cited as the father of Cyberpunk thanks to his seminal 1984 novel Neuromancer. Cyberpunk has deep connections to hard-boiled detective fiction of the 1930s and 1940s; thus, the onscreen properties made in that style often employ the film noiraesthetic, but with a futuristic edge. One of the other major elements is the bleeding together of the organic and the synthetic, blurring the line between what is real and what isnta debate thathas only gotten more heated and nuanced as technology has advanced.

Perhaps one of the earliest examples of Cyberpunk in a feature film is also arguably the most famous1982s Blade Runner. Made before either Bethke or Gibson had written their books that birthed the term, Blade Runnerbased on the Philip K. Dick novel Do Androids Dream of Electric Sheep?was labeled with the genre term Future Noir to explain its mixture of post-World War II-style malaise and near-future techno-boredom.

Its plot concerns a lonely detective searching for escaped Replicants (advanced cybernetic lifeforms nearly indistinguishable from humans) who are deemed too dangerous to be given more than a brief lifespan. By the end of the film, we realize howinhuman and robotic the hero Deckard is (even if you dont believe the theory that he IS a Replicant), and that the villain Roy Batty is simply trying to prolong himself.

Other films made shortly thereafter continued the theme of rundown futurism and the blending of humans and machines. For example:David Cronenbergs 1983 film Videodrome, in which a pirate TV signal starts to turn a sleazy cable access producer into a warrior for the cybernetic revolution. His shouting of Death to Videodrome! Long live the new flesh! continues to haunt long after seeing it.

In 1987, a slightly more tongue-in-cheek take on the subject came out with Paul Verhoevens RoboCop, in which a murdered police officer is fused with a CPU and cybernetic body parts to become the ultimate enforcer, even if it erases his humanity in the process. He fights against his programming and ultimately remembers his family. In many ways, RoboCop is the Frankenstein for the Cyberpunk set.

It was inthe 1990s when Cyberpunk as a film subgenre really took hold, beginning with Richard Stanleys little-seen (but super awesome) Hardware. In the film, a woman is terrorized in her dystopian-city apartment by both stalkers using hidden camera technology and a runaway defense robot. More Cyberpunk films followed in the early 90s, such as Freejack, The Lawnmower Man, Johnny Mnemonic, and Judge Dredd admittedly, none of those were very good.

However, Kathryn Bigelows 1995 film Strange Daysabout a VR-experience dealer on the eve of the new millennium getting caught up in a murder plot by ruthless politiciansis genius, and perhaps one of the best examples of the Gibson-esque view of Cyberpunk. Like the genre itself in many ways, Strange Days was ahead of its time and was a commercial failure, though it has since been recognized for the achievement it is.

The big turning point for the Cyberpunk live-action movement is 1999s The Matrix and its two sequels, which brought in elements of anime, Kung fu cinema, and Hong Kong action flicks. The world inside the Matrix itself was sickly green, grimy, but still slick and stylish. The notion of the machines having already taken over and humanity having to fight back from the inside is an extreme take on the idea of automated control, which the Cyberpunk movement discussed at great length. Were such slaves to our devices and comforts that we eventually becomephysically trapped by them.

The usage of Asian cinema styles in The Matrix is no accident; Cyberpunk is deeply tied to Japan and Hong Kong in aesthetic and setting. Gibson is quoted as saying of Tokyo that modern Japan simply was cyberpunk. Ridley Scott, similarly, when discussing his visual style for Blade Runner called future Los Angeles Hong Kong on a very bad day. Its maybe because of this that Japanese live-action film and anime has taken Cyberpunk almost as its own, and done more to explore both the visual capabilities and the impact of human-like machines and machine-like humans. Arguably the best Matrix-related material is The Animatrix, after all.

While there were certainly films that came before, 1988s Akira blew the doors wide open for Cyberpunk and anime to fuse seamlessly. That film depicts a thrice-rebuilt Japan in the major city of Neo-Tokyo, which is a cesspool of crime and fascistic militarization, and the strange and deadly telekinetic powers that awaken inside a young ruffian who quickly begins to use his abilities for evil before finally losing himself to psionic energy and metal. Its an astounding film, one full of emotion and fear as is rarely seen in the oft-mechanically cold genre.

In 1989, the direct-to-video Japanese film Tetsuo: The Iron Man, written and directed by Shinya Tsukamoto, was let loose on the world. Taking elements of Cronenbergian body horror and Akira-esque loss of humanity, Tetsuo is an incredibly visceral and disturbing film thatdepicts metal fetishism and people violently turning into machines in the most painful way possible. Two sequels followed in 1992 and 2009, and J-Horror would utilize its intensity and grotesquery for decades after.

Cyberpunk has again returned to the height of the public eye because of successful movies like Ex Machina and Her, which now seem very prescient given how close AI is to becoming indistinguishable from organic intelligence. One of the biggest films in the genres history is the original Ghost in the Shell from 1995, which itself begatmany sequels and spinoff series. GITS seems to be the perfect keystone bridging Blade Runner-era and current views on AI; the film follows a police officer in a cybernetic body, with her consciousness in a mainframe somewhere else, and her efforts to stop a hacker terrorist.

As Ive written about elsewhere (read my thoughts on Akira, Ghost in the Shell, and Cyberpunks humanity HERE), Ghost in the Shell represents a society thats already taken over by technology, wherein nobody thinks twice about the loss of humanityexcept the synthetic beings. Its rare in that worldfor a police officer to be organic, for example, but if humanity is all consciousness, is everything that can think a human?

Well get to explore these elements more and more as the live-action Ghost in the Shell hits theaters on March 31, Blade Runner 2049 coming later this year, and the prospect of an Akira live-action movie becoming a reality growing. Though born from writings in the 80s and films in the 90s, Cyberpunk might become the most important sci-fi genre of the 21st Century as we near the singularity.

Whats your favorite film in the Cyberpunk genre? I clearly left out quite a bit of examples; which should people check out? Let me know in the comments below!

Images: Sony/Paramount/Warner Bros/Miramax//Orion/Japan Home Video/Tokyo Movie Shinsha/Kondansha

Kyle Anderson is the Associate Editor for Nerdist. He writes the weekly look at weird or obscure films in Schlock & Awe. Follow him on Twitter!

See the original post:

The Incomplete Onscreen History of Cyberpunk | Nerdist - Nerdist

The Bees of Kiribati

By Warren Hammond

I spotted Detective Inspecteur Keo at the end of the corridor, his back against the wall, smoke snaking from the cigarette lodged between his fingertips.

Instinctively, I smoothed the wrinkles on my skirt before starting in his direction. My heels echoed in the empty corridor, but he didnt look my way, his lips moving in silent conversation with whoever was jacked into his head.

Stopping a couple feet away, I waited for him to end his conversation. When he did, I pressed my hands together in front of my chest and offered a slight bow of my head.

He took a quick drag before floating my name on a cloud of smoke. Kaikoa?

I nodded.

In Khmer, he asked, You speak Gilbertese?

Again, I nodded.

Come with me.

I followed him upstairs to the fourth floor of Phnom Penhs police headquarters, where we veered wide to pass a small group of foreigners speaking in somber voices. A teary-eyed white woman stepped forward, clearly intending to ask the detective a question, but he waved her off and led me into a small interrogation room that smelled of mildew.

I breathed deep of a stale afternoon breeze drifting through the open window. Who are those people out there?

They dont concern you.

I didnt appreciate his dismissive tone. I cant translate effectively if I dont know what this is about.

Inspecteur Keo answered with a single word. Murders.

Reprinted from Cyberworld: Tales Of Humanity's Tomorrow edited by Jason Heller and Joshua Viola with permission of Hex Publishing LLC. Copywrite (c) Hex Publishers, LLC 2016.

View original post here:

Cyberpunk Returns With New Colorado Anthology - Colorado Public Radio