Merry Christmas, it’s Akira’s 30th anniversary! And the influential anime film, released in US cinemas December 25, 1989 has everything you need for jolly holiday viewing -- vicious gangs, telekinetic powers, the eradication of civilized society, psychic children with horrifyingly aged faces, a dystopian view on how technology will consume us all, a viscerally disgusting villain that consumes and absorbs everything in its path, and one of the scariest film scores ever composed. Uh… maybe it’s not so much a wonderful life?

Akira is a chest-grabbing masterpiece, an explosive film that helped usher manga and anime into the Western cultural forefront and has influenced projects as wide-varying as South Park, Stranger Things, and Kanye West’s “Stronger.” It also gave an expansive, entertaining overview of the science fiction subgenre known as cyberpunk. First defined and explored by notable sci-fi authors like Philip K. Dick, Harlan Ellison, and William Gibson, cyberpunk works tend to feature a near-future dystopian society that is paradoxically gutted and devolved thanks to the expansion and evolution of technology. Human bodies and cybernetic approximations co-mingle, bleary-eyed protagonists fight their way through noir-tinged conflict, and the cold, steel flesh of industry, from robots to skyscrapers, juts into every facet of life -- all tinged with the iconoclastic, rebellious spirit of punk. Sounds pretty damn cinematic, no?

So, in honor of Akira’s 30th anniversary, and a world which feels more and more cyberpunk every minute, here are some of the best cyberpunk movies for you to watch, enjoy, and further convince you to delete all your social media accounts and live off the grid.

Blade Runner

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Image via Warner Bros.

If you ask your brain to conjure up an image of “cyberpunk,” it will likely produce something close to the incredible aesthetics present in Ridley Scott’s Blade Runner, a cult classic unfairly chopped and maligned upon its initial release which has only grown more and more in stature and influence as the years go by. Harrison Ford stars as Rick Deckard, a tired and frayed cop on the case to find a group of rogue replicants (cyborgs), including the instantly iconic Rutger Hauer and Daryl Hannah. The specifics of the case, in a narrative based on Philip K. Dick’s Do Androids Dream of Electric Sheep?, feel indebted to noir -- from Ford’s Bogart-on-downers performance to Sean Young’s ambiguously motivated love interest. But Scott, alongside DP Jordan Cronenweth and production designer Lawrence G. Paull, catapulted these time-honored genre tropes into a sleekly depressing neo-future, all rainstorms and skyscrapers and images that live on the uncanny edge between familiarity and shock.

The film has an awful lot to say about the ambiguity of human identity in an increasingly inhuman world, from Young’s belief that she’s human even though she’s a replicant, to Hauer’s impassioned (and improvised!) speech about his false memories fading like tears in the rain, to the coyness with which Scott plays the truth of his protagonist’s humanity (or lack thereof). All of this, combined with the film’s patient pace, makes it feel like a warm bowl of wire soup, where boundaries and labels and answers to questions mean less than giving yourself over to the tempting textures of stylish singularity. Also: Shout-out to its very, very good sequel, the Denis Villeneuve-directed Blade Runner 2049.

RoboCop (1987)

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Image via Orion Pictures

What happens if we give ourselves up completely to technology? If we decide we’ve grown weary of our wholly human bodies, and want to ascend into the comforting, hard-shelled enclosure of a robot? Would we be at the whim of our programmers? Would “we” even exist anymore? Would any remnant of our past lives be present somewhere in the inherently non-human entanglement of codes, wires, and artificial intelligence programs? Paul Verhoeven’s 1980s masterpiece RoboCop dives into the weeds of many of these questions, and makes its audience reckon with them by instilling one key, very Verhoevenian component: It’s entertaining AF.

The film, about a human cop (Peter Welker) who’s viciously attacked by a group of thugs (led by Kurtwood Smith) and “placed” inside of a RoboCop as part of Detroit’s future-forward method of fighting crime, is rife with action sequences, crowd-pleasing one-liners, and genre-happy gore effects. But Verhoeven queasily uses all of these as pleasurable Trojan horses for an equally silly/savage satire on corporatization, capitalism, consumerism, militarization, police states, the horrors of technological advancement, and the ambiguities of human identities. The fact that Verhoeven managed to sneak such a widely critical film into a marketplace saturated with hagiographies of all the things RoboCop is criticizing (this is the Reagan ‘80s, remember) while managing to make it a box office hit that sparked a lucrative franchise is downright remarkable (and, in the case of the kid-friendly animated series it inspired, a little ironically depressing).

If you’ve seen the film 10 times before, give it an 11th watch, and pay attention to how sensitive the portrayal of RoboCop’s journey through his human past is rendered.

Tetsuo: The Iron Man

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Image via Manga Entertainment

Tetsuo: The Iron Man is a hard friggin’ watch. It’s an experimental, black and white nightmare in dialogue with similar cult classics like Eraserhead and Begotten. It’s less interested in a palatable sci-fi narrative than it is in an unsparing exploration of mood. And the “mood,” courtesy of notorious Japanese cult filmmaker Shinya Tsukamoto, is “bleak.” Cyberpunk fiction is interested in the blending of human beings with cybernetic enhancements. Tetsuo: The Iron Man takes that impulse and catapults it to its crystallized extremes, stripping away all other parts for the sheer purpose of “man plus metal.” The “man” of this equation, played with hypnotic obsession by the film’s director, views hunks of metal as violent fetish objects that deserve as full of our praise and fusion as possible -- his very first action in the film is to cut open his own leg and shove a piece of metal into it. But when a salaryman (the Japanese word for “white-collar worker”) played by Tomorowo Taguchi starts literally sprouting metal as the culmination of his violent dreams and reality-blurring fantasies, the two face off in relentlessly nihilistic fashion.

Tetsuo: The Iron Man is chock-full of upsetting imagery, particularly when the titular Iron Man and his fully human girlfriend (Kei Fujiwara) attempt to copulate even though he’s, y’know, an Iron Man. But it’s not shock for shock’s sake -- Tsukamoto has a lot on his mind, and every facet of his fever dream, from the grimly handmade makeup effects to the smeary 16mm camera, speaks in service of his ultimate thesis statement: The fusion of technology and the human race will totally destroy us all. So, um… make sure you’re in the right mood before throwing this sucker on.

Total Recall (1990)

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Image via Tristar Pictures

Many works of cyberpunk fiction are interested in the bending and breaking of reality. The characters in these techno-nightmares -- both human and cyborg alike -- are sloshed through psychological and physiological ringers, where their most fundamental understanding of things like “life,” “memory,” and “existence” are poked and prodded until rendered meaningless. Total Recall -- another banger from Paul Verhoeven -- explores all of this and more, while also miraculously being a fiendishly entertaining ultra-violent Arnold Schwarzenegger picture. Based, again, on a Philip K. Dick tale (the short story “We Can Remember It for You Wholesale”), the film follows Schwarzenegger as a construction worker desperate for a vacation. But in the bonkers world of 2084, he’s not just taking any vacation -- he’s having one implanted into his brain. He can do anything he wants while not moving once, thanks to the Rekall’s procedure of transplanting memories and experiences as having actually happened. But when things go awry, and Schwarzenegger is thrown into a very real-feeling series of spy shenanigans on Mars (!), all bets of reality go out the window.

Brimming with gnarly, practical special effects (led by superstar Rob Bottin), any anchors to a real world are viscerally jettisoned in favor of taxi cabs driven by friendly not-humans, strange creatures growing out of tummys, and in one of the strangest/greatest special effects moments ever committed to celluloid, Schwarzenegger himself emerging in the cybernetic disguise of a straight-up different human woman. Cyberpunk fiction is often interested in the dichotomy and evental collapsing between the body and the brain -- here, Verhoeven dives into a brain to pummel us in the body, all to show that the future is coming inherently pummeled.

Ghost in the Shell (1995)

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Image via Manga Entertainment

If Akira was the guess that Western audiences would be into anime explorations of wild cyberpunk themes, Ghost in the Shell was the statement. Released in Japan in 1995, and then on VHS a year later in the US, the film crackled into the consciousness (or is that cyber-consciousness?) of every film fan who saw it, serving as one of the burgeoning home video market’s most eager cult hits. However, the film itself is anything but “eager.” Director Mamoru Oshii (name-checked by cyberpunk acolytes like the Wachowskis and James Cameron) has a patently strange style. Despite being technically a lean sci-fi action flick about a cyber-cop on a case, Ghost in the Shell is largely a sedate affair, with many of the best scenes playing out in long, stationary conversations in which Oshii’s jaw-dropping animations counterintuitively don’t do much.

And yet, you can’t help but fall in love with the film’s pondering, philosophical conversations, sprinkled lovingly atop some “cops getting to know each other on a stakeout” banter (in other words, Ghost in the Shell was doing True Detective before it was a twinkle in Nic Pizzolatto’s eye). This is not to say Ghost in the Shell isn’t interested in action -- when Major Motoko Kusanagi needs to kick ass, she does so with jaw-dropping craft and aplomb. Ghost in the Shell is an intelligent, influential, essential piece of work, one that is much more interested in the questions of “who is the Major” than “what is the Major solving.” As a life-imitating-art cyberpunk postscript, Oshii eventually released Ghost in the Shell 2.0 in 2008. This version of the film is ostensibly updated with superior animation and voice acting, but in my opinion, serves inadvertently to show that the Major’s final conclusions about the superiority of technology over humanity might be ultimately misbegotten. What I’m saying is “stick with the original.”

The Matrix

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Image via Warner Bros.

Red pills, dodging bullets, wire-fu, the mystique of Keanu. There is perhaps no modern science-fiction, action, or cyberpunk film that has had more of an influence on modern pop culture than the Wachowski siblings' The Matrix. Released in the unbelievable cinematic year of 1999, The Matrix is a rollicking success to this day, a film that manages to blend up a bajillion sources of philosophy, Eastern thinkers, Western muckrakers, and pop culture (including many of the flicks talked about on this list) and serve up a wholly accessible, entertaining, and smart blockbuster. Keanu Reeves plays a computer hacker Neo who knows there’s more to life than meets the eye -- and he’s looking for Morpheus (Laurence Fishburne) to lead him further down the rabbit hole. Coincidentally, Morpheus is looking for Neo, too, as he might be “The One” -- a cybernetic Jesus-figure who can free humanity from its vicious, surreptitious rule by technology.

You see, you and I don’t live in “the real world” -- we live in “The Matrix,” a computer simulation designed to placate us while nasty robots harvest our dang bodies for fuel. And as Neo, Morpheus, Trinity (Carrie-Anne Moss, starting the film off with a kick heard ‘round the world), and the rest of the modern-day-H&M-wearing resistance battle with Agents (led by Hugo Weaving) and decode cryptic prophecies and programs, all kinds of boundary-poking theories are explored in the midst of crackerjack action set-pieces.

Don’t let the Internet bozos who’ve coopted its iconography for miserable ends fool you: The Matrix continues to be that rare kind of meal, both rich in nutrients yet as delicious and addictive as candy. Kind of like the inherently unreal steak Joe Pantoliano wants to keep eating.

eXistenZ

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Image via Miramax Films

If you’ve not heard of eXistenZ, it’s because it had the misfortune of being “an incredible science-fiction film released in the same time period as The Matrix” (see also: Dark City, which is not quite cyberpunky enough to make the list but still a damn masterpiece). Like director David Cronenberg’s previous intersections of technology and human flesh Videodrome and The Fly, eXistenZ is graphically interested in what happens to our ooey-gooey corporeal beings when we smush them with too much technological advancement. In other words, it’s like if the aesthetic in that gnarly Zion sequence with all the baby batteries in The Matrix was stretched out (no pun intended) to feature length.

"eXistenZ" (not pronounced the way you’d think) is the new video game from wunderkind designer Jennifer Jason Leigh. But, as she phrases it, it’s “not just a game.” In Cronenberg’s world of, to borrow his previous lingo, the “new flesh,” video games are injected into human beings’ spines, inherently scrambling the game-happy users’ perspectives on “reality.” There’s a group of rebels known as Realists who vow to stop these video game companies from destroying humanity for good. How do they do this? Often, with surreal hunks of flesh-weapons that look -- and sorry in advance for grossing you out -- like if someone took a bunch of human skin and bone and forced them into “weapon shapes.” They still work like weapons, mind you, they just look like the ultra-gory detritus you might find in the margins of an ultraviolent video game Leigh might design. After a Realist attempts to assassinate her with one of these skin pistols, she and security guard Jude Law head on the run, diving deeper and further into the world of eXistenZ.

Cronenberg’s film plays a touch like a slower-paced Hollywoodization of Tetsuo: The Iron Man, with devices like the aforementioned spinal pods, flesh weapons, and UmbyCords (squishy flesh facsimiles that video game users semi-erotically massage while playing) speaking to his thesis that human beings are becoming more and more interested in escaping being a human. Now that technology has surpassed even our most wild imaginations, the resulting fusions will be catastrophic. That is, they would be catastrophic… if we weren’t too lost in our new realities to even notice.

Upgrade

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Image via Blumhouse

Our most recent entry to the cyberpunk canon, Upgrade comes from the vivid imagination of Saw and Insidious maestro Leigh Whannell. While he’s primarily known as a writer and actor, Upgrade allows Whannell the opportunity to flex some directorial muscle. And I mean “muscle…” well, maybe not fully literally, since after technophobe Grey Trace (Logan Marshall-Green) is implanted with a chip to save himself from a life-threatening mugging and become a cybernetic killing machine, it feels weird to accurately describe his prowess for fighting as “muscle,” given that “muscle” is, you know, a “human” thing. Whannell’s rendering of his fight sequences -- undoubtedly the physical hook for spending time on Upgrade -- is visual ambiguity personified perfectly. Grey isn’t particularly in control of his body when he starts pummeling folks -- his computer brain, voiced by the satisfyingly dry Simon Maiden, is basically using him as a flesh puppet. As such, Whannell and DP Stefan Duscio keep their camera eerily fixated on Grey as a stable axis, resulting in a curious effect where the world around him moves in chaotic anarchy while he remains still (and, thanks to Marshall-Green’s gift for physical comedy, incredulous). Upgrade thus tackles the slipper erosion of identity and independence between a human and their technological tools with unparalleled physicalization.

But that doesn’t mean I’m discrediting its screenplay -- many of Upgrade’s most eye-opening explorations of what our future could hold come in its slower moments of rest and connection between Grey and the folks he meets (especially with the gender non-conforming hacker played by Kai Bradley). In closing, I’ll say that the pitch-perfect tagline for Upgrade could be used as the catchphrase for cyberpunk fiction in general: “Not man. Not machine. More.”