“Are there any good steampunk movies?” Mike Perschon says he’s often asked. He devotes a chunk of his book Steampunk FAQ to the question and little surprise: he finds some.
But first he poses another frequently asked question—one that recurs throughout: What is steampunk? He doesn’t want to confine it to its oft-heard definition as a literary genre. As he perceptively observes, the roots are as much cinematic as literary, especially in such brass-fitted retro-future 1950s-‘60s movie adaptations as 20,000 Leagues Under the Sea or The Time Machine. He doesn’t want to call steampunk a genre at all, preferring to define it as an aesthetic, essentially a funhouse mirror on an era circa 1800-1914. Steampunk, he insists, is unencumbered by historical or scientific accuracy but evokes a fantasy version of a time period filled with technology improbable then, now or ever.
For cinematic steampunk, the pseudo-Victorian gadgetry of Wild Wild West (1999) was seminal—albeit the film fails the test of being a “good steampunk movie.” Tim Burton’s imagery of “a past that never was” also seems influential. Disney, of all studios, played a role in promoting the aesthetic with Atlantis: The Lost Empire (2001) and Treasure Planet (2002). Not all was well in Hollywood, however. The League of Extraordinary Gentlemen (2003), based on Alan Moore’s graphic tale, “was undermined by a terrible script and flawed direction.” And like many projects mentioned by Perschon, movie audiences generally weren’t aware that Extraordinary Gentlemen was steampunk—or even that such a thing existed.
But like many genres, forums, ideologies and fascinations, steampunk continues to thrive below the level of mainstream awareness. Perschon’s FAQ is a good road map.
