Al_B on 13/8/2012 at 09:37
Quote Posted by demagogue
The movies that were getting closer to good cyberpunk depiction IMO were the ones where consciousness gets glitchy when it's plugged in...
Vanilla Sky is the other one that comes immediately to mind. I keep meaning to hunt down the film its based on as I've heard it's better than the Tom Cruise remake.
Sulphur on 13/8/2012 at 09:54
Abre los Ojos? Yes. Also, Penelope Cruz again. <3
Glitchy consciousness was a PKD specialty, really. Not in terms of actual cyberpunk, though he'd done that - that's what the OP's about, after all. The truth is, there's not many interesting things you can do with a cyberpunk consciousness glitch-out that hasn't been done already, be it The Matrix or the Star Trek holodeck. There's more to be mined in a Ghost in the Shell treatment of the subject matter, where consciousness itself can be taken apart and examined under the lens of self-awareness, or fractured, or dissipated, or folded back onto itself, without the crutch of a cyberpunk 'artificial reality' to fall back on.
What I'd love is for someone to make a movie out of Ubik, balls out and mental, no compromises. It'd be creepy and effing hilarious at the same time.
SubJeff on 13/8/2012 at 10:05
I was reading your second paragraph and was just thinking "Ubik". Then I got to the end of your post.
I don't know. Ubik is such an uncomfortable and jarring read. PKD is just so nuts. But in the end - yes, someone should do a proper film of it with nothing watered down.
But if you really want to mess with people - The Three Stigmata of Palmer Eldritch. Give free candy (CAN-D) out in the foyer and at late night showings give some of the cinema staff the required stigmata for when people leave the film.
demagogue on 13/8/2012 at 10:17
Yeah, especially since there's been some good psychological horror and mind-fuck gems out there, but nobody's AFAIK has really brought it to plugged in (or cyborg maybe) consciousness like the potential is there -- ok I still have to watch Vanilla sky. We have dreams and the supernatural, VR, alientech, drugs, whatever Manchurian Candidate & Source Code were ... But I mean messed up rewiring into the soul itself kind of messed up. I'd pitch my vote in for an Ubik movie, sure.
Edit: Fuck it. I'll write a script myself. :) I have an idea just thinking about it. I just don't want it to be, the guy's mind gets glitched and now he's like a vegetable; there has to be some method to the madness. Offhand, I think the protagonist should be like that girl that implanted sensors into her fingers by knife, and it's gotta be set in South Korea, the kind of place that you could believe might pass a law allowing doctors to wire people's brains in the indeterminate future.
heywood on 13/8/2012 at 11:52
A Neuromancer film would have been the shit if it was made in the late 80s or early 90s. It would take some re-imagination to avoid seeming nostalgic today. But I'd rather take a chance on that than endure more remakes and comic book films.
SubJeff on 13/8/2012 at 13:45
David Cronenberg's Ubik would be the ticket.
Apparently (according to io9) Morgan Freeman has been trying to get Rendezvous with Rama made for years. I'd love that.
dema - 3 Stigmata would be pretty horrific if done well. The ending... :eek:
icemann on 13/8/2012 at 19:55
Cyberspace could still be done in a movie. They'd just need to explain it away first (ala a new sensory way of accessing information etc).
I have to say that I've always liked the VR bit in the movie "Disclosure". Hell I liked alot of the VR and Cyberspace sequences in alot of movies of the 90s. Vanilla Sky as previously mentioned did it very well as well.
I didn't mind how Tron Legacy (and by extension the original Tron since its based on that movie afterall) did it either.
To return to the topic of this thread, I don't think I'll be going to see this one. A good remake for me is a movie where they continue the same feel and style of the movie or movies (in the case of a movie series) that they are based on.
Take the Friday the 13th remake from 2009. I remember seeing the banner for it at the cinema and thinking what the fuck, if its Friday the 13th his mother should be the bad guy and secondly Jason didn't have the hockey mask till halfway through the 3rd movie in the originals so I initially assumed that it would be a shit remake. Then on watching it on tv I discovered that it did a stroke of mastery and answered all my questions/concerns in the first quarter of the movie by pretty much having the first quarter as Friday the 13th 1 & 2 and Jason had the bag over his head till he got the mask as per part 3. Awesome. And it felt like a Friday the 13th movie through and through.
In comparison there has been some god awful remakes that don't retain any of the feel of the movies their based off (Halloween, Nightmare on Elm Street, Planet of the Apes -the terrible Mark Wahlberg one- etc), and this remake of Total Recall suffers from this also. Watching the trailer for it straight away had me thinking of The Matrix (with the slow motion stuff in the car scene) and other 2000s sci-fi, and seeing that asian guy from Harold and Kumar/Americain Pie immediately lost it a few more points for me. I just can't take that guy seriously in anything.
ZylonBane on 14/8/2012 at 19:37
Quote Posted by icemann
I didn't mind how Tron Legacy (and by extension the original Tron since its based on that movie afterall) did it either.
Tron isn't, strictly speaking, cyberspace. Cyberspace is defined as a graphical user interface (the oft-quoted "consensual hallucination") for efficiently navigating computer networks and databases. Tron's fantasy world, OTOH, is the literal "world inside the computer".
demagogue on 15/8/2012 at 04:30
Tron was effectively the same thing as the Matrix, the only big difference being the Matrix made it up to look like the real world and Tron made it up to look clearly like a digital world, also it giving a kind of mirror relationship between data events and world events, like the way messages being sent to the monitor looked like literal blips being sent up by lasers (which Matrix 1 didn't really have unless it was a glitch, but Matrix 2-3 toyed more with that IIRC)... Except that both also had programs acting as characters in the world.
Edit: Well except for the wrinkle that in Tron, the system treated it like a transporter in Star Trek, where it disassembled the guy in "our world" and reassembled it in "its world", which in the Matrix it didn't have to do. It just implanted the perceptions directly in someone's brain... So maybe technically speaking, in Tron the actual brain looking at things was reconstructed in the computer world and seeing it from there (it's only still yours because it's made exactly the same), whereas in the Matrix it's still your normal human brain, but it's being fed the scene by the computer. So that's a pretty big difference too.
