Best Cyberpunk Movies: 12 Live-Action Films, With a Start-Here Pick

Start here: Blade Runner (1982)#

Watch Blade Runner first: every rainy neon street you've seen since is a cover version. Ridley Scott's film adapts Philip K. Dick's Do Androids Dream of Electric Sheep? (1968) with a screenplay by Hampton Fancher and David Peoples. It is set in Los Angeles in 2019, where replicants made by the Tyrell Corporation work on space colonies and a former cop named Deckard is pulled back in to hunt a group that has escaped to Earth.

It underperformed on release and became a cult film, which is the most cyberpunk thing about it. Scott said he wanted the city to look like Hong Kong on a very bad day, and almost every cyberpunk city since has been compared to it. The cyberpunk aesthetic page covers the look in detail.

The 1980s#

The first wave arrived before the genre had a settled name.

• Tron (1982), Steven Lisberger: A programmer is transported inside a mainframe and meets the programs living there. One of the first films to use extensive computer-generated imagery, and one critic compared Gibson's cyberspace to it when Neuromancer came out. Pretty, hollow, essential history.
• Videodrome (1983), David Cronenberg: James Woods plays the CEO of a small Toronto TV station who finds a broadcast signal of snuff films. The technology is video, not computers, and the film is body horror first. Not a date movie.
• RoboCop (1987), Paul Verhoeven: A police officer in a crime-ridden near-future Detroit is rebuilt as a cyborg. Written by Edward Neumeier and Michael Miner. Our read: the genre's sharpest satire of corporate policing, and funnier than you remember.
• Tetsuo: The Iron Man (1989), Shinya Tsukamoto: A Japanese salaryman finds metal growing out of his body. Opinion: the body-horror end of Japanese cyberpunk, and the point where cyberware stops looking cool.

The 1990s#

More money, more cyberspace, and more confusion about what counted.

• Johnny Mnemonic (1995), Robert Longo: Adapted by William Gibson from his own 1981 story, with Keanu Reeves in the lead. Gibson wrote the screenplay. Our read: messy, and worth seeing mainly as a record of how Hollywood tried to film cyberspace. A good name to know if you play Cyberpunk 2077, too.
• Strange Days (1995), Kathryn Bigelow: Set on the last two days of 1999 in Los Angeles. Ralph Fiennes plays a black-market dealer in a device that records other people's memories and physical sensations. The screenplay is by James Cameron and Jay Cocks, from a Cameron story. Our read: the closest film to the braindance idea in Cyberpunk 2077, and the one most people skipped.
• Dark City (1998), Alex Proyas: An amnesiac man, suspected of murder, runs from police and a group called the Strangers. Opinion: noir first, cyberpunk second, and better than its reputation.
• The Matrix (1999), the Wachowskis: A hacker called Neo learns that his world is not what it seems. The digital-rain effect was inspired by the opening credits of Ghost in the Shell (1995). You've seen it. Rewatch it for the cuts.
• eXistenZ (1999), David Cronenberg: A game designer becomes the target of assassins while testing her own virtual reality game. Released the same year as The Matrix, from the director of Videodrome. The weird sibling, and the one to pick if The Matrix felt too clean.

Recent#

• Blade Runner 2049 (2017), Denis Villeneuve: A sequel to the 1982 film, with Ryan Gosling and Harrison Ford. Screenplay by Hampton Fancher and Michael Green. Long, slow and gorgeous: the rare sequel that justifies itself.
• Upgrade (2018), Leigh Whannell: A technophobe is paralysed in a mugging and gets a chip that controls his body. Produced by Jason Blum. The cheap thrill on the list, and the best fight scenes.

Fixer's notes: order and expectations#

Opinion: if you only watch three, make it Blade Runner, RoboCop and Strange Days. They cover the look, the politics and the technology of memory. Add The Matrix if you haven't seen it, and note its debts to Japanese cyberpunk.

If you came to cyberpunk from Cyberpunk 2077 or Edgerunners, the closest live-action matches are Strange Days for braindances and RoboCop for the corporate-owned cop. Blade Runner was a key influence on Mike Pondsmith when he designed the tabletop game; what is cyberpunk and Cyberpunk 2020 cover the link.

Want animation instead? The cyberpunk anime page. For the books these films borrow from, see cyberpunk books.

For the anime that shaped the look, Akira is the place to start.