Most cyberpunk movies zig and zag between the conventional space of sci-fi entertainment. It’s incredibly visual, action packed and dances around some sort of socio-political message. But there isn’t a single cyberpunk film that gets to the root of the human condition more than Spike Jonze’ romantic film Her.
Artificial Intelligence
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Come on! There’s no way you really haven’t seen The Matrix. This is one of the best, mainstream transhumanist movie series in modern cinema. It touches on many of the core concepts of cyberpunk ideology, has some awesome fight scenes and one of the most memorable lines in all of film: “I know Kung Fu”.
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Some early cyberpunk predictions feel as distant as their publication date; as those years have come (and gone), other predictions have begun to feel horribly prescient. Sure, we aren’t all cyborgs, can’t plug our brains into alternate realities and don’t live in an eternal night. Yet other ideas – like global corporations more powerful than nations, technologically provoked social upheaval and an alienated lower class – have arrived.
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The United States continues to invest and research in artificial intelligence, a technology the Pentagon thinks will be pivotal to worldwide strength. Because of this, the military formally announced serious precautions it will take in the future.
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1990 saw the return of Robocop in Robocop 2. The sequel doesn’t suffer from a lack of talent – Peter Weller and Nancy Allen return as their roles of Murphy and Lewis, with Tom Noonan as Cain, the main antagonist.
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Maybe you never uploaded that one picture to social media. Maybe nobody recorded that conversation you had in a dark alley five years ago. Maybe you’ve faithfully kept that secret you promised you’d keep to your grave. But like the internet, you can’t remove events from your memory. Once it’s in a human brain, it stays there. And sooner or later, artificial intelligence is going to gain access to human brains.
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Can a sex robot ever replace an actual human interaction?
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The film did very well at the time in the box office and has met the test of time with a current Rotten Tomatoes score of 86%. This is rather impressive for a movie that even according to Michael Crichton had the audience laughing at the wrong times. The movie doesn’t stand up to the two successful seasons of the HBO show, but it remains very watchable for its own reasons.
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Everyday technology has caught up to the future. We aimlessly and selfishly demand all known intelligence and communication at our fingertips. So much so that it has collectively changed the perception of the zeitgeist.
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Although the artists championing the Cyborg Foundation and defending a movement before it becomes mainstream do take up much of the room of the cyborg movement, many of those on the fringe are people just trying to recover what they lost.