Does a hacker protagonist immediately make a movie cyberpunk? Can a movie be cyberpunk if it takes place in the modern day?

I had an online argument once with someone who thought Sneakers wasn’t just a cyberpunk movie but essential viewing for the cyberpunk genre. I don’t consider Sneakers to be cyberpunk, or even a very good movie, so that argument was crazy to me. But maybe I was being too much of a gatekeeper; maybe other people consider Sneakers to be cyberpunk.

At least WarGames had a curious high schooler hacker rather than a bunch of old guys in suits hacking, but I wouldn’t really consider either movie to be cyberpunk. Are they cyberpunk-adjacent though? Are cyberpunk fans likely to enjoy WarGames or Sneakers?

Here’s a trailer for WarGames. You can watch it on Max. Fun fact: when Ronald Reagan watched WarGames, he asked his staff whether something like that could actually happen. They looked into it and came back to say “The problem is much worse than you think.” This led to the creation of the first National Security Directive regarding computer security.

Here’s a trailer for Sneakers. I’m not aware of any presidents having watched this movie. I don’t think it’s streaming anywhere either.

  • Endymion_Mallorn@kbin.melroy.org
    7·
    17 hours ago

    Interesting that you want to address these two together, since Sneakers was literally created by the writers of WarGames while that movie was in pre-production.

    WarGames is not cyberpunk, because it is not punk. The Dead Code tries for ‘early cyberpunk’ or ‘proto-cyberpunk’ aesthetics (and the PC RTS game is cyber-dystopian - right down to including an actual virus on the first CD versions!). I get the same feelings from Dead Code as I do from the works that inspired cyberpunk, because it is about high-skill high-tech low-lives being forced into saving the world. In the first WarGames, the mood is too cheery, the personal dangers are too slight, there’s no personal plots. Frankly, Lightman is middle class - that makes him ineligible.

    Sneakers though is a tough one to decide. To borrow a term from evolutionary biology, I’d say that Sneakers is ‘stem cyberpunk’. It’s definitely related, and the things that evolved out of it are cyberpunk. But it’s ancestral to the genre, or a close relative of an ancestor without quite reaching the way we interpret the group. Computers as problem and solution, lowlife crew of specialists with criminal backgrounds and complications, even the deep hatred for 1980s Republican policies. There’s meat on that bone to be sure, but it wants to be a techno-thriller.

    But there’s another movie I almost always mention in the same breath with Sneakers. I’ll leave you with three words from it: HACK THE PLANET!