It has low-lifes living in the future, but there really isn't much high-tech and governments are still in control (not corporations). So do you consider Escape From New York to be cyberpunk?
Apparently the movie was an influence for William Gibson:
Escape from New York never made it big, but it’s been redone a billion times as a rock video. I saw that movie, by the way, when I was starting “Burning Chrome” and it had a real influence on Neuromancer.
But that doesn't immediately make it cyberpunk. After all, Gibson was also influenced by hard-boiled detective novels and that doesn't make those cyberpunk.
I could see the argument for this either way so I'm curious what your thoughts are.
It's streaming on Roku Channel and Freevee (Amazon Prime) if you haven't seen it before.
I know - I think They Live is definitely borderline. I was thinking specifically about the fact that the aliens were specifically using technology to control the population, represented and ran corporations to drive consumerism and sheep-like obedience, and the rebellion were scruffy leftist hackers as well as having a guerrilla movement. The concentration of the film was on the action, but the story with the aliens was more than a McGuffin.
“Scrappy tech folks trying to hack and crash the system and bring about the revolution” tips it for me, but it’s definitely an edge case and not what you’d call a canonical example.
Neither Escape nor the Mad Maxen had that kind of plot line, so I’d exclude them.