Cyberpunk: Edgerunners

Set in a nondescript year before the video game, its protagonist David Martinez and his overworked mother Gloria are at the bottom of the city’s ladder, with every aspect of their lives weighed down by exorbitant fees. David eventually has no other choice but to fall in with a gang of mercenaries — cyberpunks — after meeting a mysterious but sympathetic netrunner (a hacker, basically) called Lucy. He begins to run jobs in hope of making something of himself, and for something else that he struggles to define. Everyone’s mutual need to make something of themselves locks the populace into repeating cycles. But at least in this world, people are usually more honest about how they kill, immediate and bloody rather than the slow death of capitalism, which David experiences for himself.Cyberpunk: Edgerunners Season 1 Download.

Edgerunners goes all in on the vulgarity of Night City’s final boss version of capitalism, breaking down the various exploitative systems running their lives, from health care packages to in-home washing machines that require credit. Even within the home, this commodification intrudes — and there’s also something funny about a dystopian Netflix Original where everything in life has become a subscription service.

Sci-fi and machismo aren’t a new combination for director Hiroyuki Imaishi, who directed Gurren Lagann and, more recently, the feature film Promare. But the way he and his crew play with the rise and fall of a criminal leader in Edgerunners is distinct nonetheless. And though the series’ unpacking of this trajectory is cut a little short by its episode count, its visual storytelling manages to make up for any lost time. There’s (sometimes morbid) fun to be had with the various twists and turns in the story from Bartosz Sztybor and Masahiko Otsuka’s propulsive screenwriting, as the series goes between the violent exploitation of ’80s anime — think the work of Yoshiaki Kawajiri — and more earnest sentiment, a similar combination as in the emphatic macho posturing and genuine brotherly love in Gurren Lagann and Promare.