Why is cyberpunk so hard to film?
Science fiction is the mythos of modernity. It is to the 20th and 21st century what the Christian mythos was to earlier centuries.
And like Christian symbolism, it’s incredibly easy for the symbols of scifi to look naff.
That’s cheesy or kitsch for US readers.
Mythic symbolism is where the greatest artists play. Great painters reinvented Christ generation after generation. And now the greatest moviemakers reinvent scifi.
Denis Villeneuve is remarkable because of his ability to handle the intense symbolism of DUNE (drawn directly from Jungian psychology by Herbert) and make those giant worms and men in rubber suits feel profound, not ridiculous.
Whereas in the Dune SyFy miniseries it all feels ridiculous.
Cyberpunk symbolism is some of the most intense to come out of science fiction. While scifi tends to focus on the material – machines, space, planets etc – cyberpunk is all about the
transcendental
ESCAPE THE FLESH
is the mantra of cyberpunk.
The virtual and the simulation are how we moderns can enter other realms
Cyberpunk symbolism is very, very hard to do. The Matrix does it. Terminator 2 gets some parts of it. Blade Runner 2049. Akira. Ghost in the Shell.
But cyberpunk symbolism, like so much scifi, very quickly becomes generic
Deployed without any thought or imagination. This is a cyberpunk story, the cyberpunk genre contains : vr headsets, jacking in, hot babes with cyberlimbs etc
Cyberpunk 2077 is the epitome of generic cyberpunk. It looks great in places, but mostly it looks like generic slop, and none of it means anything.
I fear the Neuromancer series will be heavily generic and sloppy. Gibson was involved with Johnny M as well and that did…not go well. But I hope I’m wrong.
And, yes, of course Johnny is Jesus.
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Damien Walter 