Eclipse Phase inspiration: Transhuman Movies

Surrogates: The joys of synthmorphs, synthetic masks, and shell jamming. Neat story about the effects it would have on people's daily lives

Inception: Long-distance psychosurgery to steal or insert memories while people sleep. Total mindfuck.

Ghost in the Shell: Anime that deals with anti-terrorism forces in a world where cybertechnology is universal. Loves to toy with philosophical concepts

Armitage III: A transhuman anime love story about a robot-hating detective who gradually grows feelings for his robotic partner (she's an AGI), and discusses how one would define humanity in a world where a large portion of the population is not organic.

XChange: Weird movie about a world where resleeving is common technology. People who wish to travel long distances in very short time will sign a contract to swap bodies with someone else who wishes to travel long distances and lives at the destination. Not a great movie, but it's at least an interesting movie considering the topic.

2B - The Era of Flesh is Over: Deals with a society that goes through a hard transition into the transhuman age, as the first transhumans are created.

tank you for the translate

Not necessarily the best of examples, but Repo! The Genetic Opera gives an idea of the potential pull a Hypercorp could have.

Essentially the premise of the musical/film is that an epidemic resulting in massive organ failures struck humanity and GeneCo, a company dedicated to biotechnology, steps in and offers a solution by providing transplants. The catch is that they aren't free, they are willing to offer them through financing programs but they expect timely payment and defaulting on the plan has deadly consequences in the form of repossession.

The aspect of biotechnology strikes me as a bit obsolete in the EP setting, however, considering the whole creation of morphs and healing vats.

Just finished watching this french SF film, Chrysalis. It's about sleeve-tech. Well worth watching, looks like Minority Report (the same "clinical" dystopic look) but thematically it's inspired from an earlier horror film (eyes without a face , also french).

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I can't really think of any particularly transhuman movies out there that haven't already been mentioned. Least not any that are good.

For general Eclipse Phase inspiration though, the original 1979 movie Alien comes to mind. It very nearly has it all, overbearing corporations, sentient machines, X-threats, plausible treatment of space travel. I could see it as a one shot with some Planetary Consortium indents. I also think it does a pretty good job of showing how different character archetypes might respond to an unknown threat, after all not everyone is a combat expert. Only thing it is missing is resleeving into transhuman morphs.

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Though some of them might be very enjoyable, I don't think the other alien movies really have an Eclipse Phase feel to them. In the first film, one can understand why they don't have a high technology solution to the problem. (and while that remains true in the third, the setting is downright archaic) The second and fourth iterations have this almost caricatured militarism theme in them that really grounds them in the previous century. The towering technological backdrop in the fourth movie it makes it hard to take their ineptitude seriously, in that it feels like the actors are essentially cave men living in the far future.

The television series Dollhouse deals a lot in sleeving and psychosurgery. (But of course isn't a movie.)

And with how Luddite and conservative Hollywood is...they would probably be the good guys.

Haven't seen it myself yet, but Sleep Dealer sound slike one of the most transhumanity-themed scifi movies of recent years. It's about a guy in Mexico who takes a job that involves daily resleeving into a labour case situated hundreds of miles away on an American construction site. An excellent concept with, I imagine, a lot to say about current and future globalised economies. I believe there's also XP elements to the setting.

Trailer:
http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=mex99UVhZdo

Alien Apocalypse, starring Bruce Campbell - a great example of TITAN-run camps and a post-apocalyptic landscape

The Cat from Outer Space, starring Mr. Whiskers - examples of asynch abilities

Not precisely related, but still a great movie - Freejack, starring Emilio Estevez and Mick Jagger. It's unreal watching this movie, set in NYC 2009, and realizing how eerily similar it is... I wish all my Shadowrun games ran like this.

I did not see Bladerunner mentioned - a true groundbreaker and set the stage for cyberpunk through the 80s (best decade!).

Appleseed also has some good stuff in it, synthetic humans, cyborgs, a city controlling AI, cool power armor and weapons along with great anime visuals mixed with some stupid interpersonal dialog.

Since I just watched a few episodes again: Aeon Flux, the animated series. So many good ideas for truly weird machines, environments, people and plots.

I recently saw the film In Time, and I have to say it was an interesting parable regarding traditional economics spliced onto the backdrop of soft transhumanism. In it, the human race has genetically eliminated the aging process, and people cease physically aging at 25. In order to curb population inflation, they implement a system in which everyone has a clock on their left arm which starts off with a single year and begins counting down once they reach the age of 25. Time becomes the new currency, and people now work for hours and days rather than dollars and cents. The hyperelite of the world are effective immortals that live for hundreds of years, and have thousands to come.

I won't spoil the plot for you, but it was an interesting look upon the cutthroat nature of classic capitalism, and the flaws of social Darwinism. I highly recommend.

Not really. The only wealthy parent you explicitly meet in the movie has only a single child. On the other hand, you see quite a few kids living in the ghettos. It seems like the usual status quo is maintained. Of course, this also plays into the central point of the storyline... time is a commodity, and for you to gain it, you must take it from others.

For a few to be immortal, many must die.

Gattaca is a movie from 1997 that has very strong EP themes; I am surprised it hasn't been mentioned. It focuses itself around the central idea of genetic enhancement, and while in essence it is a cautionary tale against genetic enhancement it provides an interesting view of a purely free-market genetic augmentation system. Very worth watching.

I scanned through the posts and I didn't catch anyone mentioning the television series "Quantum Leap." This may be time travel, but it's method is through consciousness transfer. Would that be a tachyon egocasting method? In a similar vein, the movies "Source Code" and "Deja Vu" use variations on that theme, I think. And with a stretch of definition, "Groundhog Day" movie and "Daybreak" (?) television series had future consciousnesses regress back in time, memories intact, which is more time-traveling egocasting, I guess. The morph is relatively the same, of course. Maybe a little less worse for wear, at least.

Many can be imported extremely simply.

The Shining: the PCs are custodians on a habitat or sleeper ship in a long transfer orbit. Everything is automated, they should just relax and enjoy themselves. But what happened in the past their environment? As the stress points slowly build up they will start to crack...

Dracula: an eccentric gerontocrat arrives to the habitat. Strange things are starting to happen. Exactly *what* is Mr Dragwlya? Are we talking about perverted human appetites, an exsurgent infection, or something utterly alien that is trying to blend in while it cultures qubit fungi inside the morphs of people?

Attack of the Body Snatchers: All too obvious.

Blair Witch Project: Why not start the game as a flashback, essentially framing the whole story as "This is what we found in the recovered stacks?" The players know things will end badly, but not how.

The Thing is of course *the* classic exsurgent horror.

The Fly: An ordinary egocast, and something goes wrong with one of the PCs. They get merged with someone or *something*. Gradually hallucinogenic and frightening visions and memories are emerging - and if they revert to the backup they find it corrupted too. Conversely, maybe the bodyshop they got their new morph from was not entirely kosher. Exactly *what* have they sleeved into?

Rosemary's Baby: how do you make a TITAN interface for mankind? You have it grow up as a child, of course! Singularity seekers have secretly set in motion a plan to have their TITAN software manifest through a growing child, allowing it to learn how to interact with humans in a "natural" way. They just didn't tell the mother about it.

Silence of the Lambs: How do you catch a horrific Fall criminal and identity thief? You make use of another one, safely (?) locked up in a simspace prison and giving advice in exchange for small favors. Except that there might be more things going on than mere human evil... and danger can spread through a few words into your ear.

Psycho: The PCs need to go somewhere quiet, or visit a remote location. They egocast to a Brinker habitat, where they only see Norman as representative of the population - the others value their privacy, he claims. They also seem to be pretty xenophobic in their beliefs. Of course, the real problem is that Norman killed them... and anybody defiling their nice pure morphs by inhabiting them.

In the Mouth of Madness: The PCs are sent by Firewall or some other organisation to pick up the work of a genius consultant, researching xrisks. As they get to his abode things get stranger and stranger - they encounter characters or events from his various scenarios. Which recently have gotten increasingly bizarre. And they soon start to feel as if they are inside one of his last reports, something about "cosmological psychotic breakdown"...

The Monolith Monsters: A gatecrashing team accidentally brings back something that looks entirely innocuous. It isn't. Imagine getting something into a habitat that grows explosively in contact with water... or information.

- The Mountains of Madness

It should have been just a simple exploration through one of the gates. A job rolled up by the Miskatonic University (Valles-New Shanghai) and they needed the PCs skillsets. The First Team found some strange ruins and mummified lifeforms which are similar to ruins found on another Exoplanet. The First Team didn't report back through the portal and so the PCs and their investigative Expedition are launched through the portal.
They find the camp in ruins, death is everywhere, one person is missing, tracks leading west, towards the mountains and the lifeforms are buried anew. What happened here? And where is the missing teammember?

I probably missed the reference but Videodrome would should be on anyone's list of horror influences for Eclipse Phase. Conspiracies, dangerous information hidden in media signals, unexpected growth of unusual organs due to exposure to messages hidden in data, and infolife in the form of Dr. Brian O'Blivion, who exists entirely on television.

Lockout: former spy to rescue the First Daughter from a orbital jail during a massive breakout. It screams Jovian Junta themed operation with a crazy vilain

EVA: Spanish flick about a robotics programmer using his niece as template for robot personna, finding himself in the middle of a family tragedy. very nice and poetic visual ideas for psychosurgery and object programming

Battleship. suffice to say that the alien canon shells look a lot like a TITAN touched reaper morph, and the aliens themself would do great Exhumans