Ok, yes, this movie isn't cyberpunk. I'm not even sure if it's cyberpunk-adjacent. But it feels like they wanted to make a cyberpunk movie and were forced to shove a War of the Worlds storyline into it instead. I know nobody is going to care about this movie but I wanted to talk about it anyway. Well, I mostly just wanted to share my rambling thoughts after watching the trailer...
First of all, one of the movie's taglines is "DATA IS THEIR FOOD" and that just... what does that even mean? Are the aliens AI now? How does that even make sense? Is that just an intriguing statement for the trailer or is it actually a plot point? I have to watch the movie now just to see if the aliens actually "eat" data because that's ridiculous.
More importantly, the movie seems to be focused on mass surveillance, technology, and personal data. That's where it almost feels cyberpunk-adjacent to me. If the real focus of the movie is on the "surveillance industrial complex" (another line from the trailer) then I'm curious where they're going with this. I've always considered the topic of data privacy to be adjacent to cyberpunk themes so I'm curious if that's what this movie is truly about.
Final thought... Is the entire movie just Ice Cube sitting in his office watching the events transpire from his computer/cellphone? Because that'd be amazing. The trailer makes it look like everything is viewed as a combination of facetime video calls and streaming video news reports and I wonder if that's what the actual movie looks like (and how long they commit to that bit).
I looked into it a bit and apparently this movie was filmed in 2020 and is only just now being released. The trailer dropped today and the movie will be available on Amazon Prime on July 30, so less than a week away. There's no way this movie will be good and I assume the only reason it's seeing the light of day is for tax purposes. It could be a glorious train wreck though.
