What Happened to the Cyberpunk Genre?

It's been about a decade since "The Matrix," and we live in a tech-obsessed world where the computers have largely taken over. So what the heck happened to the cyberpunk film genre? First, a quick definition. Cyberpunk was a genre of science-fiction that rose to prominence in the 70s and 80s with titles like Philip K. Dick's "A Scanner Darkly" and William Gibson's "Neuromancer." Its common settings are dystopian futures dominated by urban landscapes, where invasive technology permeates nearly every part of human life, and corporations have more power than traditional governments. Hackers and artificial intelligence are common players, and along with many different variations of the internet. Narratively, most of the stories have their roots in noir and detective novels.

Film adaptations have had mixed success, and the most famous features like "TRON," "Blade Runner," and "Ghost in the Shell" are still beloved only by the niche. Many thought that this would change with "The Matrix," still the biggest cyberpunk film to date, and there were some who predicted that we were seeing the birth of a new film genre for the 21st century, to supplant the void in the popular culture left by westerns and old-fashioned noir. To some extent cyberpunk elements have found their way into the mainstream. Action films and television shows regularly feature hacker characters, megacorporations are common villains, and the Internet continues its ongoing takeover of human society. But I think we've yet to see the genre fully embraced.

Looking at recent films like "Surrogates," "Gamer," and "Repo Men," there's no question that cyberpunk has had impact and made gains, enough to up the number of decent additions to the genre every year. However, they've never really taken hold the way superhero and apocalypse films have in the cineplexes lately, though both of those have built on common cyberpunk tropes. Yet the "Terminator" franchise aside, cinema apocalypses are still more likely to be the result of zombies and aliens than runamok technology. And while everyone purports to love "RoboCop," the film is rarely remembered as the satire on corporate and consumer culture that it was, and usually gets lumped in with the more knuckle-headed 80s action-adventure films

More telling, cyberpunk and science-fiction films in general remain on the fringes of "serious film." Before last year's "District 9" and "Avatar" picked up Best Picture nominations, decisions strongly derided in some circles, you have to go all the way back to "Star Wars" in 1977 to find another science-fiction film that managed to do the same. However this year's "Inception" is widely expected to rake in the kudos, so who knows? Maybe it's a sign that science-fiction is on the verge of finally getting some respect. Then again, when you mention the genre, it's still the space operas and the little green men from Mars that get the most press. And many have argued that "Inception" is closer to a parapsychology work than science-fiction, though its technology-aided corporate espionage owes quite a bit to Philip K. Dick.

My armchair theory - you knew it was coming - is that the reasons cyberpunk never quite took off was because the prognostications were too close to reality. Cyberpunk had its heyday in the 80s when it was a dark vision of a far-off future, but now we're all but living in it and the social commentary aspect hits an awful lot closer to home. Spaceships, giant robots, and dream-walking are all far more speculative, more suited to escapism and fantasy. A modern tech-savvy thriller like "Untraceable" would have been a cyberpunk film twenty years ago. Consequently, some of the genre's classics have aged awfully quick. "Hackers," with Jonny Lee Miller and a cherubic young Angelina Jolie, now plays like an alternate-history retro-tech nostalgia trip. "The Net" with Sandra Bullock is downright hysterical.

And yet I remain optimistic. The central themes of cyberpunk are being explored and examined more thoroughly in cinema than ever before. As the visions of Gibson and Dick have become reality, we have new films like "The Social Network" and "Catfish" that are carrying on the tradition with its outsider heroes, sinister corporate forces, and growing ranks of the anonymous and the technologically empowered. Except they're real-world social dramas now. The days of extreme body cyberization, virtual and augmented realities, and the rise of the corporate techno-hegemony don't look to be far off either (I, for one, welcome our Google overlords). In some ways hard science-fiction always has to be niche, because it has to stay one step ahead of the real and almost-real. So cyberpunk - the parts that are still science-fiction - will never be truly mainstream.

But that's not a bad thing.