The 90s VR Movie: The Lawnmower Man had a lot to answer for
Tom Jolliffe looks back at the wave of straight to video Virtual Reality films that followed in the wake of The Lawnmower Man in the mid to late ’90s…
The idea of virtual reality worlds has been something of a sci-fi staple for many decades. Cronenberg toyed with the concept in
Videodrome. Philip K Dick’s classic short story,
We Can Dream it For You Wholesale was adapted to the big screen as
Total Recall. However, during the video game boom of the early 90s, alongside a progressive wave of developing CGI technology, VR became immensely popular, with everything from naff TV game shows, to movie concepts.
W
hatever happened to The Future? You’re living in it s orry for the mess; we weren’t expecting company. Just clear a spot among the discarded red hats and empty Mountain Dew liters and have a seat, because we’re going to talk 1990s cyberpunk cinema. Back in the ’90s, we had a different vision for The Future (aka the 2000s). Yes, it was also dystopian AF, but at least it looked cool and the tech was awesome. Instead of sleek black-leather suits and flying cars, what do we have in 2021? Neon Crocs and Bluetooth butt plugs. Lame.
8 Movies And TV Shows To Watch If You Loved Cyberpunk 2077
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Image: Marvel/Sony
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Cyberpunk 2077 is still in a rocky state, but if you manage to overcome crashes, floating fingernails, T-posing NPCs and disappearing objects you’ll find a very intriguing game at its core. Throughout
Cyberpunk‘s main story you’ll explore the strange, intertwined relationship between V and Johnny Silverhand as both vie for dominance in the same body. The plot raises questions of human consciousness, the nature of the soul and the painful dangers of tech integration waiting for us just over the horizon.
In 1995, Keanu Reeves appeared in a dystopian sci-fi movie called
Johnny Mnemonic. It was set in “January 2021” and imagined a world where the internet was a dangerous place, poisoning people’s minds. So it pretty much got all of that exactly right, but not even
Johnny Mnemonic predicted how truly bizarre the internet of 2021 would get, or how Keanu himself would get swept up in one of its stranger episodes.
Reeves is currently appearing as a key character in the video game
Cyberpunk 2077. In the game, Reeves’ likeness appears as “Johnny Silverhand,” a rockstar turned war veteran and cybernetic badass. Beyond Johnny’s robot arm, he pretty much looks exactly like Keanu Reeves. Which kind of poses a problem, when players are using mods to alter the game and in particular one that allows them to put any character’s likeness in the game onto another player model. Specifically, players used the mod to make a “sexbot” character named joy toy look like Kea
Adrian Tchaikovsky’s latest novel,
Bear Head, follows the story of Jimmy who has allowed his modified brain to be rented out for an illegal data dump. However, he soon finds out that said data is, in fact, the cloned intelligence of a political refugee called Honey… who is a bear.
A thought-provoking political thriller that we have described as “a wonderfully strange blend of a story that sits somewhere between
Total Recall and
Johnny Mnemonic with just a touch of
Animal Farm thrown in for good measure” we needed to find out more, so we spoke to Adrian Tchaikovsky about the thoughts and inspirations behind the novel…