Live-Action Akira Film Is Still Getting Made

[UberNoodle]

Bladerunner, while a great film and one of my favourites of all time, was more sci-fi than cyberpunk. It also dealt more thematically with the concept of artificial intelligence as intelligence than most cyberpunk does. Cyberpunk is more based in the themes of future day class systems and street VS corporate. It's also more heavily rooted in a digitally enhanced contemporary day (or contemporary as seen in the 80s/90s anyway) rather than a future world as seen in Bladerunner.

Lastly, the most important reason I'd say Bladerunner is cyberpunk is becuase it helped create it. Don't believe me? William Gibson's Neuromancer came out in 1984, and is widely regarded as one of the defining Cyberpunk novels. Bladerunner came out in 1982, and William Gibson has freely admitted that when he saw it, he was afraid to release Neuromancer in case people thought he'd plagiarised it. Bladerunner pre-dates most, if not nearly all, examples of cyberpunk literature, yet has many of the same elements. Does that not make it a progenator of the cyberpunk movement?

For the record, Blade Runner was intended to have a much cleaner sci-fi Look. Basicly think sterile clean ala Mirror's Edge "Future". The dirty Version was done due to cost. So yeah, totally unintentional and yet that made it so popular. Or rather, made it cyberpunk as opposed to merely being sci-fi. By Default Cyberpunk is a Sci-Fi Genre, since its always set in the "world of tomorrow" as it were.

Well the novel and the film feature futures that are not clean at all. The world is quite distopian and has most of the biosphere extinct due to pollution and global nuclear war, which has also severely damaged the world economies and caused a global health crisis.

Society is based around feeling 'empathy', (the 'android test' is a test to measure empathy) through relationships with artificial, bionic animals (the Android Sheep), and a religion (or Cult of Personality) in which followers merge in collective consciousness via 'Empathy Boxes' to share the pain of their self-sacrificing 'god'. There is additionally a rival religious movement based on Consumerism and broadcast via TV.

Spoiler

Neither leader of these two religions are actually human

Compare to Gibson's themes and you will find several similarities and parallels. For example, users, via Neural Interface Machines, find A.I. gods on Cyberspace. The world has also been ravaged by war, been made synthetic with machines and simulacrums, suffered long exploitation by corporations and private interests, and it is facing the rise of true intelligence from synthetic beings. Also, in Count Zero, Bobby's mother, like millions of people globally, is not only hooked on a kind of pan-religious consumerism, but also 'stims' - neural interface soap-operas - which allow viewers to 'feel'.

So anyway, none of the things we call 'cyberpunk' were called so when they were released. They were just 'new', 'interesting', 'groundbreaking', etc. It is only in retrospect that we try to cram all these things into current genre labels. Whether Blade Runner (Or Do Androids ...) is Cyberpunk or not, doesn't matter to me. It is a tradition unto itself, just as Neuromancer, Count Zero and Mono Lisa Overdrive are. The themes they are explore are for the most part the same - consumerism, corporatism, war, pollution, religiosity, the nature of the soul, the loss of the 'natural' for the synthetic, the rise non-human intelligence via technology, the meshing of human and machine, organic and synthetic, etc.

 

[LogicNProportion]

Akira minus Keanu Reeves: slightly relieved.
Akira still being remade with America in mind (probably): no, just hell no.

If a live action version must be made, make it in Japan and base it off the manga and not the movie.

[small]Is there one competent person left in Hollywood...?[/small]

Akira was never the one being made with Keanu Reeves, there IS Robert Pattinson (sp) though...

Even worse, Keanu is playing Spike in Cowoby Bebop...

 

[Smooth Operator]

Oh god people, if you can't do it proper (with anime that is an inevitability) then just let it be.

 

[lord.jeff]

Honestly I can't say this bothers me.

I mean, it's not like there can be only one thing called Akira and this negates the existence of the original. If anything, it gets more people to watch the original. In fact, I've kind of wanted to see if it was worth all the bitching, despite not liking anime in any way shape or form.

And even if there's only a 1% percent chance of it not being shit, might as well let them try. If it's really horrible, then they might not do it again, and we all get something to laugh at. If it's awesome, then we get an awesome movie and people who don't like anime (me) can see what this whole Akira thing is about. And I bet at least one person in this thread hasn't seen the original until they heard about the new one, and that has to be some kind of benefit, right?

This is correct, no matter how bad the new movie is the original still exists and this is going to only bring attention to it. Plus people need to stop this it's Hollywood therefore it sucks, America still makes a lot of good films.

 

[Krion_Vark]

No No noononononnnonnoooonnoooooooooooooooooooooo! Okay i realize i have a bit fanboyish tendencies, but i didn't even like Akira that much and the story was kinda loose to begin with. If they can bring order and a decent plot to it then more power to the americans but considering their history well

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and.....

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....well you can imagine my confidence in them to be a bit lacking so I see where the akira fanboys are coming from which is why the only director i may be able to trust with this is james cameron and i still think avatar was not that great but i think he would get the point across with battle angel alita....maybe the matrix brothers could pull akira off....

You know, to be fair Blood was actually decent, sure some of the fight scenes seemed a little weird, and I've only watched the anime casually, but it was alright.

The Anime Blood+ is not what the movie is based on. The Anime is actually based off of an Anime movie of the same name as the live action remake. And it actually follows said anime movie pretty well to a point but lasts too long on the English characters rather than the killing of vampires(talking about the live action one) but then changes the ending completely if I remember correctly.

 

[dthree]

Bladerunner, while a great film and one of my favourites of all time, was more sci-fi than cyberpunk...

Lastly, the most important reason I'd say Bladerunner is cyberpunk is becuase it helped create it...

For the record, Blade Runner was intended to have a much cleaner sci-fi Look...

Well the novel and the film feature futures that are not clean at all. The world is quite distopian and has most of the biosphere extinct due to pollution and global nuclear war, which has also severely damaged the world economies and caused a global health crisis...

Great discussion here. I have to admit, my knee-jerk reaction was to jump in with an unreasoned "sftu n00b, no way is PKD cyberpunk!" but your comments compelling enough to make me think again. It's true that, chronologically, "Do Androids dream..." is not cyberpunk. There's a reason that name arose for the genre, which has parallels to the themes of anti-establishment in the punk movement of the 1970s. The thing is, even though PKD's book predates this, he certainly stands apart from his scifi predecessors (and contemporaries) like Niven, Clarke, Heinlen, etc. I agree that PKD can be viewed as a bridge between hard scifi and cyberpunk. It's pretty clear that Gibson and his contemporaries were influenced by PKD. Had he lived through the 80s, I wonder if he would have written more books that people could classify as cyberpunk. Would he have read Gibson? Speaking of Gibson, the Neuromancer/Blade Runner aesthetic could be the fault of a common fandom by author and director: http://www.williamgibsonbooks.com/archive/2003_01_17_archive.asp

 

[Imp_Emissary]

where there any hopes for this movie ever since it was announced this goes for any adaptations anime or video games wise
feels this belongs

That is worse than having to see the poor girl from Akira who had her shirt ripped off and nose broken, (warning: spoiler alert) end up crushed to death at the end.

 

[nekroskoma]

i'm hoping that Collet-Serra realizes how bad an idea it is and turns it down

i think he knows Del Toro so i hope he has some sense if by association

 

[theaceplaya]

The best thing we can do about this is to not go see it and convince others to not see it and buy the original instead. We can scream about it online all we want, but studio executives only listen to our wallets.

 

[Aptspire]

from one shitty director to the next

 

[GDW]

Why do all insist that this is a remake? Can't we accept that, for the first time, someone wants to adapt the entire comic into a film (series of films, they were talking two parts or a full trilogy)? Let's face it, the first is a fantastic piece of science-fiction, but it doesn't do anywhere NEAR justice to the epic that Otomo laid before us. The only thing I'm worried about (now that I know Reeves' talentless ass is out of the picture) is that they're trying to settle on a lower budget... this may end horribly...

 

[Reed Spacer]

Hey, technically the original anime Akira sucked. Do you have the slightest idea how much of the story was either cut out or outright changed?

The movie used less than a tenth of the original manga, maybe even less.

Katsuhiro Otomo wrote and directed the film and created and wrote the comics before that. If anybody is qualified to change art to convert to another, it is the orginal artist.

Well, he should have done a better job of it. Way to piss all over your own work, Katsuhiro. Compared to the manga, it's literally offensive, his directing it or not.

 

[UberNoodle]

Hey, technically the original anime Akira sucked. Do you have the slightest idea how much of the story was either cut out or outright changed?

The movie used less than a tenth of the original manga, maybe even less.

Katsuhiro Otomo wrote and directed the film and created and wrote the comics before that. If anybody is qualified to change art to convert to another, it is the orginal artist.

Well, he should have done a better job of it. Way to piss all over your own work, Katsuhiro. Compared to the manga, it's literally offensive, his directing it or not.

Why would it be 'offensive'? The movie doesn't cancel the comics out or replace them. They both co-exist perfectly well. There's nothing 'offensive' about that.

 

[UberNoodle]

Why do all insist that this is a remake? Can't we accept that, for the first time, someone wants to adapt the entire comic into a film (series of films, they were talking two parts or a full trilogy)? Let's face it, the first is a fantastic piece of science-fiction, but it doesn't do anywhere NEAR justice to the epic that Otomo laid before us. The only thing I'm worried about (now that I know Reeves' talentless ass is out of the picture) is that they're trying to settle on a lower budget... this may end horribly...

The reason is in public record. This new movie is not a case where a director has become enamored with the idea of making a particular film and is pushing it through the business end so he can realize his or her vision.

No, this is yet another case where the business side has bought rights to a property and is shopping for talent to get it made, whichever way possible, big budget or small, big vision or small. It doesn't matter to them, and therefore the only purpose the film will exist is to ride the original film's coattails to cash.

Very little film making in Hollywood, when instigated by the business end, is done for any other reason, which is why there's so much dross produced and far fewer personal and passionate projects which if Akira was one of them, it could be amazing. Clearly, from everything we've seen, it isn't going to be.