Overview: No, this is NOT a great movie, but I love the Rolling Stones, so sue me!

In Freejack, the earth’s environment has become severely damaged, to the point that most people suffer some form of illness. But technology has advanced to the point that someone’s consciousness can be transferred from one person to another. Also, a version of time travel, where a body can be taken forward to the “present” (2009), while risky, has become possible. Now, bounty hunters from the near future raid the past for perfect bodies with flatlined brains to bring forward in time to sell to the highest bidder. Emilio Estevez plays a race car driver who crashes and dies in a spectacular way on live TV back in 1992, but just before he dies, is taken to the future by a shady character played by Mick Jagger.

The Bottom Line: Freejack loses out incredibly on believability, as does it for its insanely fast prediction for both the destruction of the earth and the relatively rapid speed of technology progression. In retrospect, maybe this movie should have taken place in 2049 instead. One wonders Murphy took a cast with Emilio Estivez, Rene Russo and Anthony Hopkins and then churned out something so cheesy. It’s movies such as Freejack that gave cyberpunk films a poor quality image by the early 90s. Still, Jagger is pretty fun in this, as is the rest of the cast. As long as you turn off your brain, you should enjoy some decent cyberpunk visuals here.

EDIT: ETM reminds me in the comments below that Freejack also does bring up an interesting question that needs consideration: if technology gives life to a person, does the one who owns the technology own that life? This alone bumps it up to the “medium” catagory in the cyberpunk themes.

Overview: Pierce Brosnan as 007 stars in this scifi espionage flick about a guy with a lawnmower who tries to take over the world…Well, that’s not exactly it, but close

This might be another one of those I’m out to lunch on, but I’m guessing most have seen this flick. Lawnmower Man was originally derived from a Stephen King novel (although considering that King sued to have his name removed, we might infer he wasn’t thrilled with this movie), and is about a genius government funded scientist (Brosnan) who’s doing research on increasing human intelligence through using drug-assisted virtual reality experiments. His research, originally done on chimps, was cut off when a chimp goes wild, so instead of giving up, he does the research in his basement, using the local lawnmower dullard as his test subject.

Over time, the Lawnmower guy becomes awesomely intelligent, so much so that he grows more powerful than anyone could have possibly imagined. So much so, in fact, that he becomes a potential threat to mankind!

The Bottom Line: Lawnmower man is an early entree into 3D graphics. The graphics were rather decent at the time but certainly looks dated now. It’s still a nice scifi thriller that fully qualifies as a cyberpunk movie in every way possible. I enjoy this, and generally like Brosnan movies, but maybe its just a guilty pleasure of mine. Whereas I find it watchable in a cheesy sort of way, I can certainly imagine others scoffing at some of the insane plot points (like going from a multi-million dollar a year funded defense project, to getting better results in your basement). But even if you find this one watchable, it’s a pretty clear bet that you won’t stand a chance at liking the sequel.