Bright: Will Smith does Shadowrun

Cafe Society
21

In Shadowrun, pretty everyone was human until the distant future year of 2011, when babies started being born and later (2021) people changed into metahuman races. It’s not clear if this is a similar case or if the races have always been there. I am thinking more the former as the “diversity hire” would’ve been earlier, probably.

Orcs and Elves, does this have any other races like dwarves or trolls?

It looks interesting, I’m not too into cop dramas but might be good. I wonder why EdgertOrc just standing slack jawed while Smith is shooting?

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Is it official shadowrun or an imitation?

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The white-haired kid I initially took for an elf seems to have sharp teeth.

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William Gibson (the godfather of cyberpunk) once said that he instinctively disliked Shadowrun because of the way it mixes his literary DNA with elves.

And now we have this movie, which have people going, “ooh, Shadowrun minus the cyberpunk!”

It’s funny how the wheels turn.

25

So, this is Will Smith doing “Men in Black VII”?

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Looks pretty good - but I’ll wait for the reviews.

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Not related, not necessarily a ripoff. Not sure if the Shadowrun people responded.

Fair enough, but it’s Netflix, the cost to you is presumably $0

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It’s more about whether or not I’ll spend the time than what it would cost me for a ticket.

29

Yes.

It’s 2017. Look outside the window. Sure, it’s not exactly the consensus milieu the collective cyberpunk literary movement imagined in 1989, but if you sat down and wrote any story set in present day real life 2017 and took it back in time to 1989 it would be a cyberpunk story.

30

Why, because we have cell phones and Google? Cyberpunk is about a lot more than ubiquitous technology. I’m struggling to come up with any reasonable value for cyberpunk that fits our real life.

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Nope. A constant in cyberpunk was humans with integrated technology - people with jacks to connect to networks, bionic parts, etc. Don’t get me wrong - 1989me would be impressed with the tech 2017me has - but we’re not “jacked in” as they used to/will say.

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Nor are we at the same level of corporatism. In a typical Shadowrun-style cyberpunk world, Wal-Mart’s private security forces would be more powerful than the city government’s police.

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So Idiocracy is cyberpunk?

“Please come back when you can afford to make a purchase. Your kids are starving. Carl’s Jr. believes no child should go hungry. You are an unfit mother. Your children will be placed in the custody of Carl’s Jr.”

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No, Idiocracy is a different capitalist dystopia. You’ll recall that I’m the one who put “capitalist dystopia” and “cyberpunk” in different bullet points to begin with. But Shadowrun-style cyberpunk specifically is corporatist.

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It’s also not dark and raining all the time, and we’re not all dressed in black leather, shiny suits or punk garb. So we’re not quite Cyberpunkworld yet.

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Whoosh. In the movie, Brawndo basically controls the government, Carl’s Jr. sponsors the Secretary of Energy, etc. I don’t really think that this makes it cyberpunk, though.

37

Sure. Of course we’re not experiencing the consensus 1985 cypberpunk future. It’s not raining, we’re not wearing black trenchcoats and mirrorshades, we don’t have 128 megabyte memory chips implanted in our brains.

But on the other hand, our day to day life is MORE cyberpunky. They imagined that cyberspace would be a wild-west outlaw world for the skilled 733+ Haxx0rz. Instead it’s so quotidian that grandmothers use it everyday to swap pictures of the grandkids.

We don’t realize we’re living in a cyberpunk world because it’s so normal to us that we’re fish that don’t know they’re wet.

As for integrated technology, when’s the last time you rode the bus and noticed 97% of the people glued to their phones? Oh, they don’t have neural implants that shoot the information directly into their brains? Yeah, surgically implanting last year’s phone model into your brain turns out to be a terrible idea. What happens when next year’s phone comes out?

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No, it isn’t.

It fails literally every single point of what makes cyberpunk.

Cyberpunk is a collection of very specific dystopian tropes, combined with a very specific set of technological assumptions, which are not simply ‘communication technology beyond what existed when the genre was started’, and a very specific aesthetic.

Certain parts of the world are verging on a couple of the tropes, but a) they’re also trending toward different dystopian tropes in other cases, and away from any dystopia in still others; b) they’re not there, yet; and c) other parts of the world are trending in completely different directions, some good, some bad. And, of course, actual cyberpunk technology is every bit as impractical as you’ve said it is, which is just proof we’ll never actually be a cyberpunk universe.

Saying ‘we live in a cyberpunk future because people always [del]have datajacks[/del]carry smartphones’ is exactly the same thing as saying ‘we live in a Star Trek future, because people always carry [del]communicators[/del]smartphones’.

Actually, it’s less accurate than that, since Apple’s aesthetic, and the Federation’s aesthetic, run along the same ‘clean lines and lots of white’ lines, particularly in TNG and the movie universe, so the world actually looks sort of like the Trek universes in parts.

(And, of course, having a smartphone is a lot closer to having a communicator than having a datajack, for the simple fact that it can be taken away, can’t be used to hijack your brain, etc, etc, etc.)

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I want to jump in and say, you are mistaken- they do a very good job of hijacking people’s brains. :slight_smile:

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I mean, technically, it’ll cost the 10 bucks or whatever that Netflix costs…