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It's been a very long time since I've seen the movie, but I was going to make the same point that the director does: it was never intended to be realistic, just
by TillE 11y ago
It's been a very long time since I've seen the movie, but I was going to make the same point that the director does: it was never intended to be realistic, just a fantasy which captured the right feelings. It's probably not a good movie for other reasons, but I think it was successful at doing that.
I've heard similar criticism of William Gibson's work, that his 1980s-flavored cyberpunk makes no sense scientifically now. And that's true. But it still completely works as a fantasy world.
- theoh 11y agoI just recently discovered from Wikipedia that Gibson was inspired by the urban drawings of Jean "Moebius" Giraud and other artists who worked on the magazine "Heavy Metal". It makes a lot of sense to understand his key cyberpunk novels as essentially visual and "urbanistic" experiences, i.e. not driven by a hard sf take on data visualization.
- pakled_engineer 11y agoSome of Gibson's 80s writing is almost prophecy, like New Rose Hotel >Set in the near future, huge megacorporations control and dominate entire economies. Their wealth and competitive advantage reside in the human capital of their employees and the intellectual property they produce. Corporations jealously guard their most valuable employees and go to great expense to keep them safe and happily productive. There is little point in traditional corporate espionage as new products are developed at a lightning pace; there is no time to capitalize on the intelligence acquired from a rival firm, it will be obsolete before it can be used. Companies now hire extraction agents to steal each other's top productive employees.
- sevensor 11y agoYou really have to appreciate the "punk" as much as the "cyber". Especially in his early stuff, Gibson's message is punk --- "cyber" is just a setting.