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Have there been good steampunk movies? I can't think of any.

Maybe it's as much a failure of marketing as a lack of interest by mainstream audiences.

 Future War Cultist wrote:
Ever notice how steampunk blockbusters don’t tend to do very well at the box office?

Steampunk is niche; my girlfriend calls it "hipster sci-fi".

What was the last big budget steampunk movie?

Wild wild west. Very successful. Actual steam punk.

 Lance845 wrote:
Wild wild west. Very successful. Actual steam punk.

It made ~52 million, which isn't that successful given that it had the backing of the TV series, Will Smith, Kevin Kline, Kenneth Branagh, and Salma Hayek.

There have been big budget steampunk movies between Wild Wild West and now. That we might argue which of them are “real” steampunk movies might be part of the struggle of this genre.

 BobtheInquisitor wrote:
Have there been good steampunk movies? I can't think of any.

Maybe it's as much a failure of marketing as a lack of interest by mainstream audiences.

Steampunk also runs into issues with consistency of the world. You need some kind of super fuel to power these steam driven engines or else none of this technology is viable as people cannot be carrying around kilos of coal with them and stopping to shovel it in to their furnace on their back. But then why are people not adapting that super fuel into a more efficient design, such as an internal combustion engine? And how is the energy stored for use in, say, weaponry? Why is that technology not just being used as portable energy storage which is recharged from power sockets supplied with electricity by huge power plants burning this super fuel?

Much of the steampunk setting that is popular (especially among cosplayers) is big on the steam, but lacking on the punk. They like the big clothes and facial hair of the victorian era, especially with some brass cogs stuck on there for random reasons, but don't seem near as interested in the portrayal of the workhouse children producing those clothes, the miners dying from exposure to the dust of the super fuel mines, the racism, the classism, the impacts of imperialism etc.

To be fair, steam is *very* efficient - why do you think they use it for nuclear reactors?

 A Town Called Malus wrote:
Much of the steampunk setting that is popular (especially among cosplayers) is big on the steam, but lacking on the punk.

Has some steampunk ever been punk? I thought it was named steampunk as a reference to cyberpunk but never had anything to do with anything punk (a bit unlike cyberpunk that had a very nihilistic outset and focussed on street characters and all that).


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 JohnHwangDD wrote:
To be fair, steam is *very* efficient - why do you think they use it for nuclear reactors?

Which, incidentally, means that nuclear submarines are literal steampunk engines of mass destruction!

Has some steampunk ever been punk?

That’s a very good question.

My first introduction to steampunk was a comic book written by Neil Gaiman called Teknophage, about a dinosaur man who survived millions of years to become a Gilded Age robber baron style intergalactic warlord. Now that definitely had political overtones.

Hey but political undertones alone don't really make a thing punk, do they?
I wouldn't call very obviously political syfy like 1984 or Brave New World punk.

But the politics in this case are criyical of dehumanizing corporate greed. I think this is why steampunk seems such a natural analog to cyberpunk. There is a strong parallel between the excesses of the Gilded Age and the mega-corp dominated future.

 BobtheInquisitor wrote:
Have there been good steampunk movies? I can't think of any.

Maybe it's as much a failure of marketing as a lack of interest by mainstream audiences.

The only ones I can think of are animated films.

Namely Steam Boy.

Wild Wild West I guess was okayish, if you were okay watching a really stupid popcorn flick that knew it was a popcorn flick and didn't try very hard.

WWW was OK, but I wouldn't call it "good". It just never falls together as something believable.

 BobtheInquisitor wrote:
Have there been good steampunk movies? I can't think of any.

Maybe it's as much a failure of marketing as a lack of interest by mainstream audiences.

Well, like Backfire said, there was Sky Captain (even if it's actually Diesel Punk). There's Wild Wild West which, while profitable, was not profitable enough, and was a critical failure to boot. And then there's The Golden Compass, which wasn't well received either.

Now I would say that, in the desire to produce a grand looking spectacle, the makers of punk movies forget crucial things like the plot and characterization, but that wouldn't explain what happened with the Bladerunners, which are two of the greatest films ever made and yet were still box office disappointments. I know that these movies are all technically from different genres, but what they have in common is that they're all 'punk'.

Maybe we just have to face the fact that punk genre movies are niche, not for mainstream audiences, and that they'll never be successes at the box office. If the reactions to Bladerunner 2049 from my workmates at the time are anything to go by, punk movies are ironically too 'highbrow' for most people.

Without wanting to be too harsh, I'd criticize the punk genres as immature art forms. By that, I mean they are relatively new, niche, and have not developed much. They're often valued for their visual and stylistic appeal, but offer little else that makes them compelling. Hollywood and big budget entertainment often struggles with style over substance, which probably doesn't help them much when trying to tackle a genre that has the exact same problem.

I don't think it's correct to characterise "punk" as an art form as such. It's just a nickname for a genre of music and various SF sub-genres. The art form is music, or literature, or film.

As regards the prioritisation of style in big budget, that is a natural consequence of the visual medium in which spending $100M on a script won't make a film look 1 cent better, so the money gets spent on the visuals.

Ironically, the His Dark Materials books which for the basis for The Golden Compass, are one of the very best YA fiction series of the past 50 years, and the translation to film was done with style and panache, yet somehow it didn't work despite the high quality of the original source material.

I would love for Snyder to do Neuromancer

Jonny Mnemonic was a failure.

 Kilkrazy wrote:
Jonny Mnemonic was a failure.

It was also over 20 years ago, not Snyder

Neuromancer by Dennis Villeneuve would be a treat.

 Manchu wrote:
But the politics in this case are criyical of dehumanizing corporate greed. I think this is why steampunk seems such a natural analog to cyberpunk. There is a strong parallel between the excesses of the Gilded Age and the mega-corp dominated future.

Thanks, I understand your point better now, and it does indeed link Cyberpunk to Steampunk.
But I think the part that lead the cyberpunk genre to having punk in the name is less the criticism of corporate greed (which definitely was a big part of the genre, don't get me wrong), and more the cynicism and the “street creed” of the protagonists, imo.

Kilkrazy, I'm mostly musing about why the SF genre got their name from the musical thingy.

Back in the late 1970s, both pop music and were seen by some as being in a rut.

Then British Punk Rock broke out with a new energy and passion. In the same way, the new cyber based SF was seen as a disruption and challenge to established forms, with new authors and new things to say. The name of punk got attached to the new sub-genre of SF.

This IMO explains why Steampunk and Dieselpunk haven't lit up the skies in the same way. Instead of being a disruption and challenge to the establishment, they are actually somewhat conservative forms which give a nod to late Victorian SF and pulp era SF. Even the use of "punk" is a lazy way to describe them, and Dieselpunk is a doubly lazy name, obviously imitating Steampunk which imitates Cyberpunk.

Obviously I am painting with a broad brush here. There are some very good Steampunk books, ironically some of them by Cyberpunk stars (e.g. The Difference Engine) as well as new writers.

 Kilkrazy wrote:
Back in the late 1970s, both pop music and [???] were seen by some as being in a rut.

I think the word you forgot was science-fiction, no? Or litterature?

 Manchu wrote:
But the politics in this case are critical of dehumanizing corporate greed. I think this is why steampunk seems such a natural analog to cyberpunk. There is a strong parallel between the excesses of the Gilded Age and the mega-corp dominated future.

But that's a key disconnect. Cyberpunk is is now and forward, but steampunk is back in the day: it's a nice thought but it really doesn't matter.

 dogma wrote:

It also spares the actress grueling makeup sessions every time her face is shown on screen. Then there's the rating issue, her scar as depicted in the books would likely have netted the movie an R rating.

If that's actually true, then it only reinforces the problem the industry has.

 dogma wrote:

 Manchu wrote:
But the politics in this case are critical of dehumanizing corporate greed. I think this is why steampunk seems such a natural analog to cyberpunk. There is a strong parallel between the excesses of the Gilded Age and the mega-corp dominated future.

But that's a key disconnect. Cyberpunk is is now and forward, but steampunk is back in the day: it's a nice thought but it really doesn't matter.

I think the idea is, this dehumanization is systemically linked to technology. It’s not as if evil arrived with the computer.

The notion of a disfigured face automatically causing a R rating makes no sense. Cher's kid looked like a monster, and it hot a PG-13, not R

Has anyone ever read "Perdido Street Station" by China Miéville? It's pretty "punk" for steampunk.

Any of his stuff set on Bas-lag (the world) put the punk in steampunk. Super dark, creepy and gritty.

I’m adding lots of things to my reading list. Incidentally, I’m about to begin reading twenty thousand leagues under the sea. I don’t know if it’s steampunk exactly, but if it’s not, it’s the next best thing.