Look, I know what you movie folks think when I say I’m “into cyberpunk” right now. You’ll eye-roll me when I bring up Blade Runner for what feels like the zillionth time. You’ll roll your eyes at how Ghost in the Shell is “dated anime.” You’ll complain that cyberpunk stories are just “corpo bad, hacker good” and nothing ever changes. And then you’ll watch me spend three hours talking about how the lighting in Akira still blows everything Marvel’s putting out of the water.
Trust me, I’ve had this exact conversation at least half-a-dozen times after screenings over beers. It always ends the same. Someone sheepishly confesses they’ve watched The Matrix trilogy more recently than they’re willing to admit.
Believe me. I know the feeling. Cyberpunk, in theory, should be exhausted by now. The whole genre feels like everything important happened in the ‘80s and we just watch reruns. We’ve seen the stylized rain-soaked streets a thousand times. We know what a badass hacker wearing leather and pumping glowsticks into their body looks like. But when I’m editing commercials or corporate videos I think about how we light reflective surfaces and chrome these days. How we design digital interfaces…
Damn. We live in a cyberpunk film and we don’t know it because we’re too fucking dumb to light it like, well… cyberpunk.
I attended SXSW last year. Work required me to edit some behind-the-scenes video for a client so I ended up spending the better part of a day in the media lab before hitting the parties. Ended up waiting in line for these VR booths running Ghost in the Shell experiences. Was behind, like, ten groups of people. None of them were kids. Weirdly, it was mostly adults my age and up. “Professionals” who should have known better. But lemme tell you: you should’ve seen their faces when they took those headsets off. It was like watching them discover wonder for the first time. God, I felt that way watching Tron: Legacy in IMAX. And I knew damn well the plot was nonsense and Jeff Bridges looked like he melted into his digitally younger self.
Cyberpunk is okay with us wanting the future we fear. Megacities are overcrowding problems with amazing light rigs. Surveillance tech? Heck, we got that. It’s just being sold to us by Silicon Valley bros instead of government robots. At least in cyberpunk, you can fight back.
Honestly. That’s why I keep coming back to these films. I promise you I try to take breaks from them. But it’s like once I start watching, I lose track of all the other movie sub-genres. As much as cyberpunk films focus on technology, they focus more on how we interact with tech. The computers in these movies aren’t just tools. They’re worlds, identities, dangers, lovers, gods. Cyberspace as a “consensual hallucination” ain’t just Gibson being a poet; it’s acknowledging that our relationship with technology is psychological.
I’ve been editing computer-based video for nearly two decades now. I work with software that would’ve blown 80’s filmmakers’ minds. But you know what still looks more futuristic than my MacBook Pro? The computers in Blade Runner. Give me that chunky keyboard and grayscale monitor over any “usable interface” Apple’s ever produced.
Alright, hear me out on the whole murderous robot-AIs. Sure, it’s been done to death. Ever recurring villain since HAL can trace their heritage back to 1968. But Ex Machina dropped and suddenly everyone watched that movie and was like “OMG I’M SUCH A CYBERPUNK AF.” I couldn’t have not heard that movie’s thesis banged on by five different people who were “over” cyberpunk six months prior. Difference? Easily digestible, plausible technology.
Cyberpunk loves taking our collective anxieties and amplifying them until they’re beautiful. Cyberpunk was born out of the ‘80s when home computers became viable. Business dress code became power suits. MTV made everythin,g seem like a neon video flat under masturbatory feedback. Cyberpunk exaggerates that “what if this, but more?” To what degree can we take these trends before they push too far?
Pretty far, apparently. Yearly, I spend more time editing “reality” than some characters in these movies. Colour correcting footage to look “better” than they did in-camera. Compositing shots that could only exist with visual effects. Making cheap mascara look like diamonds. It’s what cyberpunk promised we’d be doing. It pays my bills, and no one’s really trying to stop me. The revolution got bought and sold out of existence without us even noticing.
If you read any headlines about Cyberpunk 2077’s launch, you’ll see plenty about glitches and broken promises. What I found interesting was how many people played it despite those criticisms. And I think why stems from the same feelings I get when watching old cyberpunk films. Night City is the world I’ve been dreaming about my entire life but spent way too long actually living. Sure, the game has problems. But when was the last time you got to walk around in someone’s immersive dreamscape? Good production design will always pull you into a film. Cyberpunk 2077’s production design asked you to live inside its world, glitchy or not. And when your reality is pulling you one way, and your dreams are screaming at you to do something else… man, it’s easy to lose yourself in cyberworlds.
Last year I attended CES for work. Had to go shoot some B-roll at various booths my clients were meeting at. If you’ve never been to CES, it’s basically a cyberpunk conference that forgot it was supposed to be fiction. Companies were pitching augmented lenses you could wear instead of glasses. Brain computer interfaces. AI that could mimic your deceased grandmother’s voice. And it’s all presented as BRAND NEW technology with hearts around the emojis in their copy.
It was everywhere I looked, which is why I feel fine standing amidst the wreckage of Cyberpunk and saying “hold my bait.” Cyberpunk never asked if our future was moral. Cyberpunk asked if we wanted power, and if we were willing to lose our souls to get it. Cyberpunk’s protagonists don’t win. At best, they scrape by on personality points and earn seconds in the light. They can’t destroy the corporatocracy, but they can subvert it. They can’t live without surveillance, but they can repurpose it.
See, that’s achievable. We can’t stop Google or Amazon, but we can jailbreak our phones and use VPNs. We can’t escape digital capitalism, but we can be picky about what ego we sell and to who. The cyberpunk fantasy isn’t about victory conditions. It’s about holding onto your identity inside someone else’s machine.
Honestly, I think Altered Carbon got that better than any recent cyberpunk story. The tech was repulsive and beautiful in the same amount of measures. Having your consciousness uploaded sounded amazing but was only accessible to the wealthiest of people. Body-switching as the ultimate freedom and prison all at the same time. It got canceled after two seasons, likely because it was too strange for mass audiences. But AC gets cyberpunk. Cyberpunk is attractive and revolting in the same breath.
Cyberpunk. Ain’t that a kicker.
I met up with some hacker group in Austin last month. Buddy of mine owns a cyber security firm and needed someone to shoot some video for their presentation. We ended up in this venue that was basically a cyberpunk movie set that didn’t know it. Steel industrial buildings with exposed brick. Hackers with laptops slurping up whatever wastewater cables were feeding them into the walls. Of course, it wasn’t lost on anybody. These guys spend their careers preventing the kind of invasive tech cyberpunk celebrates.
But they had Akira posters hanging everywhere. They blasted Perturbator between speakers.
See, I think cyberpunk films and stories will never die because they’ve already happened. Sure, we’ll find new permutations of the genre and retread old ground. But unless our relationship with technology fundamentally changes, we’ll need these stories to remind us what it means to be human. Cyberpunk shows us what it means to be human by amplifying our journey there. Sometimes those paintings are nightmares. Other times, they show us ourselves… twisted and vibrant, pounding bass beneath a kaleidoscope of flashing lights.
And you know what? Some days, that person is cool as fuck. Even if they’re dying.
Dylan grew up rewinding VHS tapes to study practical effects and never really stopped. Now based in Austin, he writes about sci-fi cinema with the eye of a filmmaker and the heart of a fan—celebrating the craft, the weirdness, and the magic of futures built by hand, not computers.