Year: 1998
Directed by: Ryutaro Nakamura
Written by: Chiaki Konaka
IMDB Reference
Degree of Cyberpunk Visuals: High
Correlation to Cyberpunk Themes: Very High
Key Cast Members:
Lain Iwakura: Kaori Shimizu
Overview: Serial Experiments Lain is a psychedelic, post-modern cyberpunk series that one wonders how the director ever managed to make. Lain centers on a very shy school girl who slowly begins to figure out that she is not what she seems to be. After getting a computer and connecting to the “wired,” something with is far more expansive than the internet, Lain begins to realize that she may not be human, and that truly, reality and the “self” is exists (or does not exist) on many different levels. As the story progresses, Lain “evolves” in terms of understanding what she is and her place in a very post-modern world. We also get many interesting side stories, including crime, teenage coming of age issues, and dastardly plots.
The pacing of Lain is just strange. Lain is NOT an action fest, nor is it by any means straight forward. Lain starts out rather slowly and gets weirder every episode. Truly, the story is told in a very “traditional” post-modern fashion in that we have fragmented vignettes structured in a seemingly random non-linear manner. Lain uses disconnected visuals to continually barrage the viewer with different textures, color schemes, and sounds. Yet over time, it becomes clear that the story is being spunk in seemingly a cyclical fashion, almost as if we are exploring a large Mandelbrot by starting at an outside spiral and slowly working our way around to the big picture. Each fragmented vignette gets added to until, at the end, we have a rather expansive tapestry to explore.
Many different and interesting philosophical ideas. But it is pure philosophical cyberpunk. Many key issues are discussed here, including:
- What constitutes “reality”?
- How real is time?
- What constitutes the “self” as a singular entity?
- What constitutes “God”?
- How are sentient programs different from humans?
- Is there such a thing as collective humanity?
The visuals in Lain really aren’t there to “Wow” us as they are in some animes - instead they are often designed to provoke moods and thought patterns (BTW, there are so many screen caps available, that there was no need to take my own). Among the thought provoking visuals, we get:
- Psychedelic visions that explore multiple “selves” versus a singular “I”
- Juxtapositions of noise with false clarity
- Information Theory described visually
- An ever increasing feeling “disbelievability” each time the drab and normal school scene is shown.
The Bottom Line: In the end, we are left with very open-ended thoughts. Serial Experiments Lain does not provide us with answers, instead, it opens us up to questions. And while I might argue that the post-modern pacing got too circular in places, and that I might argue the same tale could have been spun in half the time, the overall effect is rather extraordinary.
~See movies similar to this one~
Tags: cyberpunk movie review anime Serial Experiments Lain
Movie Review Status: So I’ve started getting reviews up. I have lots more reviews to upload (like 30-40 or so), but not all are in wonderful shape. I’m wondering whether I should get the reviews up first so that the movie link structure is more complete, and then just update the reviews as I go, or whether I should spend more time and get higher quality reviews up at a slower pace. Currently I’m leaning towards a slower pace - maybe 1 - 3 a day or so.
Site Development Status: I STILL have a ton of work to do, both in look and feel, and in functionality.
- At a minimum, I need to display some more of the categories on the left hand side, so that people have access to things like “surreal cyberpunk movies, android movies, animes, etc.
- An awesome graphic artist (Budo) has agreed to do a header graphic. Hopefully I can talk Budo into doing reviews as well.
- If you look at a single movie post, and go all the way to the bottom, you’ll see a set of categories that that movie resides in. I’ve been trying to figure out how to move that over to the sidebar for single posts, but up until now, I’ve been too stupid to figure this out. Then again, maybe it works better on the bottom. Maybe I just figure out a way to put a hyperlink anchor to take the user down to there.
- I have to put a list of credits in the footer to list all the wonderful plugins I’m using
- I need to decide what to put in the header. I think I’m going to remove the movies by decade link and just leave this on the right, unless someone tells me this is a bad idea.
- Currently, I have my site using the default setting for comments, which is “moderated.” Is this a good idea? I hear spam is a monster. Hmm…I may keep this also unless someone tells me otherwise.
Movie Categories: Currently I have one category grouping called “cyberpunk themes” that has the following sub-categories:
Alien movies
Dystopic future movies
Hacker movies
Hot cyberchicks kicking butt movies
Man-machine interface movies
Surreal cyberpunk movies, and
Virtual Reality movies
I have another category called “Style” with the following subcategories:
Animes
Awesome cyberpunk visuals
“B” cyberpunk cinema (I haven’t put many reviews here yet, but suffice to say there are LOTS of these)
Good low-budget movies
Soft core porn cyberpunk flicks
I have a few problems here. First off, I’m not sure there is enough differentiation between the categories. To me these seem different, but I can certainly imagine a list with all of these from both categories included. Second, I feel these may not cover everything. For some movie reviews, I find myself not putting anything in one of the two categories - this makes me think that maybe I’m missing something. Most likely it’s the “cheesy but sometimes decent” middle movies that are too good to qualify as B cyberpunk, but aren’t good enough to be called good. The other easy example is only having one category for anime, versus having say “anime movies” and “OAV animes.”
Finally, whatever categories I come up with, I want these to be able to work for other cyberpunk genre stuff like books, graphic novels, and potentially music. I fully get though that the cyberpunk culture stuff will need its own category, as will related scientific fields.
Thoughts?
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