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10 best steam punk movies - Magical Realist - Feb 25, 2019

I love steam punk! It's a very unique subgenre of science fiction. Included are some you might not have heard of. The commentary here is very insightful..

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=xzZUxlpCnA8


RE: 10 best steam punk movies - Yazata - Feb 25, 2019

I didn't think that they were all steampunk. Certainly not the 19th century corsets and dirigibles Victorian version.

Most of these were fantasies with sort of an anachronistic flavor. Much of it seems to have been based on a pre world war II but still 20th century aesthetic, like HG Wells' 'Things to Come' (a fascinating vision of a scientistic dictatorship where the scientists band together to stop war by using, ironically enough, superior super-science weaponry to blow away anyone that resists their dictatorship). I've away appreciated 'Metropolis' set design, but it's more of a 1920's style communist allegory than steampunk. 'Baron Munchausen' seems more 18th century, before the age of steam.

Perhaps the only real steampunk movie in the bunch was '20,000 Leagues Under the Sea', set in the 1860's. Captain Nemo's 'Nautilus' seems to have been a very early version of a nuclear submarine, not exactly steam. But at least it's set in the right era. Jules Verne lived from 1828 to 1905, so he's from the right era too.


RE: 10 best steam punk movies - Syne - Feb 26, 2019

Some of those were steampunk-ish, but most were just retro-futurist. I don't think steampunk, as a genre, is bound to the Victorian era so much as the aesthetic.

Mortal Engines seems to be the latest to fit the steampunk aesthetic and the retro-futurist technology.


RE: 10 best steam punk movies - C C - Feb 26, 2019

(Feb 25, 2019 11:49 PM)Yazata Wrote: I didn't think that they were all steampunk. Certainly not the 19th century corsets and dirigibles Victorian version.

Most of these were fantasies with sort of an anachronistic flavor. Much of it seems to have been based on a pre world war II but still 20th century aesthetic, like HG Wells' 'Things to Come' (a fascinating vision of a scientistic dictatorship where the scientists band together to stop war by using, ironically enough, superior super-science weaponry to blow away anyone that resists their dictatorship). I've away appreciated 'Metropolis' set design, but it's more of a 1920's style communist allegory than steampunk. 'Baron Munchausen' seems more 18th century, before the age of steam.

"Metropolis" and "Things to Come" are sometimes touted as either ancestral inspirations for or early instances of steampunk's cousin Dieselpunk -- categorized as such ex post facto.

Dieselpunk is also more amenable to film noir. The latter surely being the sole reason that "Blade Runner" is classed therein at times.

Ten Best Dieselpunk Movies
https://steampunkopera.wordpress.com/2012/06/24/the-10-best-dieselpunk-movies/

Sans that notorious movie version in 1999, television of course had a '60s foray into steampunk with the "Wild Wild West". It can only receive the label retrospectively. But since the term was coined in the 1980s, "The Adventures of Brisco County, Jr" at least had a shot of being called such when it debuted in 1993.

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