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80's tech noir

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Zepp Twofist

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I'm watching Terminator 1, which is arguably the movie that first put the "tech noir" concept out there since a club in the movie is called exactly that. So which other movies do you people have that add to the tech noir mythology? Preferably also 80s stuff, but I guess this genre has had sort of a renaissance in the past few years.
 
I'm at the point where Sarah and Reese are escaping the police station, and the intense music playing while they are escaping is something else.
 
Zepp Twofist said:
So anybody think it's weird that John Connor send his good friend Kyle Reese back in time to bang him mom?
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If you were sitting in your bunker and your only choices were to stop existing and doom the human race, or send your bro back in time with a beer and some flowers, which would you choose?
 
I think I am watching an extended edition or something so the scene where Kyle is deciding to bang Connor's mom is really tastefully done here.
 
jiji said:
This is just cyberpunk, right? Or in a Venn diagram, the two overlap almost completely.
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Visual style vs thematic style, i think?
I figure you can have something that is basically cyberpunk without having the aesthetic typically associated with it.
 
Well, if it is cyberpunk that you are looking for, look no further than

http://rekall.me/

which is a classic cyberpunk themed tumblr with an emphasis on Japanese cyberpunk (as well as excellent yet unusual shots of architecture). A bit of a warning, this tumblr can be a bit NSFW at times (as classic cyberpunk could occasionally be). Still, as someone who absolutely loves cyberpunk, I could read through this tumblr for hours (and I take every chance I get to tell people about it).
 
Richard Stanley's Hardware

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The good Total Recall.

edit: I rewatched the first two Terminator movies over the last couple of weekends and it really bums me out that I saw T2 knowing more or less what it was about as a kid and then the original sometime later. I bet those movies would be great to watch back to back without knowing a thing about them.
 
Not sure if this might count but "Captain Power and the Soldiers of the Future" might be up your alley. It's a kids tv show from 1987 so your tolerance for 80s cheese and slightly subpar acting might turn you off of it.
 
Not 80s, but Movies like Dark City, Minority Report, i Robot and 12 Monkeys probably qualify as more modern tech/neo-noir

Dark City in particular has a very 80s feel to it fwiw.
 
George Oscar Bluth II said:
Yeah, Looper is really good.

I faintly remember quite a few GAF members really disliking it, though. Probably for some nerdy time travel reason.
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I still haven't seen it. I passed up many opportunities to see it because the promo material made it look awful. Now I'm curious, but not curious enough to pay money.
 
What is tech Noir?

Is it basically 80s retro-futurism, in the same way as steampunk and dieselpunk, but with more neon and analog synths?
 
vonStirlitz said:
What is tech Noir?

Is it basically 80s retro-futurism, in the same way as steampunk and dieselpunk, but with more neon and analog synths?
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It's more of a neo-noir in a futuristic scifi setting. The movies in the genre are as much defined by the progression of the plot and character archetypes as they are with the general aesthetics. I think steampunk and cyberpunk are more just setting descriptions so you could have a cyberpunk tech noir like Blade Runner is.

Edit: forgot my movie suggestion. Cyber Tracker is 80s ish and is tech noir
it's garbage though but the rifftrax episode is great.
 
OP,

As a dude with similar tastes, my recommendation will come out of left field but watch Halt and Catch Fire on AMC. It has the 80's tech, the music, and the noir-tech feels.
 
For another entry: Wild Palms, Bruce Wagner's miniseries, is a sunnier variety of this.

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Tech Noir + Sunny California + Media + Politics + Criticism of Scientology = Wild Palms.

A true blue masterpiece, it was so ahead of its time and totally gonzo that ABC had a 1-900 line(1-900-773-WILD) so people could call if they didn't understand the show. It is amazing, prescient, and just about the weirdest thing ever put on broadcast television. Twin Peaks came and a lot of imitators followed in its wake but they all followed the flavor(small town weirdos!) and not the soul of big, weird, creator driven ideas. But Wild Palms is just that, it is Bruce Wagner just going big with all of his crazy(with the clout of Oliver Stone producing, the likes of Katheryn Bigelow directing an episode, and Ryuichi Sakamoto doing the score) and the result is, well,... TRAILER

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"I have seen the future...and it is Channel Three."
 
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