I'm losing faith in film as a vehicle for good science fiction.

[Lorizael]

Really, the idea that technology can change humans is silly and weird?

[loinburger]

It is when it's voiced by transhumanists.

"Music can expand your chakra until you're able to bend spacetime by the mere act of whistling."
"That sounds pretty stupid."
"What do you have against music???"

[KrazyHorse]

Music raped my sister and she had a baby that was half-human and half-rock opera.

[loinburger]

Ouch. Tommy, or Jesus Christ Superstar?

[KrazyHorse]

Joseph and the Amazing Technicolor Dreamcoat

[-Jrabbit]

A Scanner Darkly was weird. It really grew on me in subsequent viewings. I liked Minority Report as well.

I was a huge fan of Philip K. Dick back in the day; read all his stuff. He received little recognition as a writier during his life, so it's interesting that a lot of his work got to the big screen, long after his untimely death.

BTW, has anyone seen Paycheck?

[Garth Vader]

BTW, has anyone seen Paycheck?

I liked it.

[Lorizael]

It is when it's voiced by transhumanists.

"Music can expand your chakra until you're able to bend spacetime by the mere act of whistling."
"That sounds pretty stupid."
"What do you have against music???"

The extremists of any group are always the loudest and the craziest. The moderate transhumanists are mostly just in favor of life extension, brain enhancements, and other fairly reasonable ideas.

-Jrabbit: Avoid Paycheck like the plague. It as a dreadful movie. Philip K. Dick did not write action.

[BlackCat]

Could be interesting to see a movie made over P.F.Hamilton's The Night's Dawn trilogy - that is, the ending should be rewritten

[Fve Crathva]

The extremists of any group are always the loudest and the craziest. The moderate transhumanists are mostly just in favor of life extension, brain enhancements, and other fairly reasonable ideas.

That's science, it has nothing to do with transhumanism. Transhumanists believe in technological advancement increasing exponentially with no bound until at some arbitrary point human society magically transcends its current form. That is silly. Transhumanist visions of the future are weird by definition, because they are based on the idea that regular people have all been murdered by computers or transformed into superintelligent beings or whatever. Not human enough for Hollywood, and not cheap enough for risktakers.

SP

[Ming]

Could be interesting to see a movie made over P.F.Hamilton's The Night's Dawn trilogy - that is, the ending should be rewritten

Knowing Hollywood, they would probably rewrite the whole story...
(See I Robot)

Hamilton's latest trilogy (the Void) is great. I look forward to the third book next year.

[Kitschum]

Strange Days is very good for this pretty limited genre. I enjoyed Screamers 10 years ago so I don't know how it holds up, but it is nothing special and it's not very cyberpunky.

I've been meaning to watch New Rose Hotel any day but I can't say my hopes are high.

[-Jrabbit]

I find it very amusing that anyone would call Dick-derivative films cyberpunk. He was basically doing character studies in alternative universes/realities. The man died in '82, right about when cyberpunk was starting.

That said, he did a lot of "one small man in a big weird world" settings, which have come to be pretty standard cyberpunk milieu... And it's also true that film versions of Dick's work stray pretty far from his narrative lines.

[KrazyHorse]

Jrabbit, Dick and Ellison are the New Wave authors who basically CREATED what would later be called cyberpunk.

[KrazyHorse]

I suppose I should also include JG Ballard, but I'm not a huge fan of his writing (though I do acknowledge how influential it was)