Netflix's 10/10 Sci-Fi Masterpiece Makes Even Blade Runner Look Small

Published Sep 7, 2026, 1:00 PM EDT Ben Sherlock is a Tomatometer-approved film and TV critic who runs the massively underrated YouTube channel I Got Touched at the Cinema. Before working at Screen Rant, Ben wrote for Game Rant, Taste of Cinema, Comic Book Resources, and BabbleTop. He's also an indie filmmaker, a standup comedian, and an alumnus of the School of Rock. After elevating a haunted-house-in-space B-movie to the level of A-movie prestige in Alien, Ridley Scott got even more ambitious with his next feature. Based on the Philip K. Dick novel Do Androids Dream of Electric Sheep?, Blade Runner stars Harrison Ford as a grizzled cop in futuristic Los Angeles, who’s tasked with hunting down rogue cyborgs that have assimilated into the rain-drenched city. Scott brought all the tropes and conventions and aesthetic markers of a hard-boiled detective noir into a neon-soaked near-future, and, more broadly, he pioneered the visual language of cyberpunk. Along with Jean-Luc Godard’s Alphaville, James Cameron’s The Terminator, William Gibson’s seminal novel Neuromancer, and both the manga and film versions of Akira, Blade Runner was one of the early pioneering works of the cyberpunk genre. It’s since influenced everything from Steven Spielberg’s own Dick-based sci-fi noir, Minority Report, to Netflix’s big-budget re-sleeving adventure Altered Carbon. Altered Carbon brought the dystopian spectacle of Blade Runner to the small screen, and gave us a much longer timespan to immerse in this futuristic metropolis. But it wasn’t Netflix’s most ambitious cyberpunk show; that would be Cyberpunk: Edgerunners. Cyberpunk: Edgerunners Brought Depth To The Video Game's Immersive World Arguably the most immersive experience within the cyberpunk genre — more immersive than reading Neuromancer, more immersive than binge-watching the Blade Runner movies back-to-back, even more immersive than watching The Matrix in a theater — is the video game Cyberpunk 2077 (at least after they fixed all the bugs). Cyberpunk 2077 is basically a GTA game set in a Blade Runner universe; it’s a massive, sprawling open-world RPG set in a dazzling, neon-lit urban hellscape called “Night City.” The best part of Cyberpunk’s gameplay is the open-world exploration. The characterization is paper-thin (mostly to account for the malleability of the interactive narrative), the plotting relies on tired tropes and clichés, and a lot of the story missions involve really boring, frustrating gameplay features like walking through hallways, listening to voice recordings, and fighting a losing battle against bosses whose health regenerates faster than you can shoot them. Netflix’s TV adaptation, Cyberpunk: Edgerunners, takes the best part of the game — the worldbuilding — and improves upon everything else. It has a much tighter, more focused narrative; it has much more compelling, well-rounded characters; and it feels a lot fresher, more original, and more engaging. On top of all that, it’s brought to life with eye-popping animation, bursting with color, filled with rich textures. The video game’s visual style was gorgeous in its own way, with lifelike photorealism to match the shaky-cam first-person gameplay, but the TV show is its own beast. Cyberpunk: Edgerunners Is Getting A Sequel Next Month On October 20, Netflix is set to release Cyberpunk: Edgerunners 2, a standalone sequel to the original series. The new show has lined up a fascinating cast of characters: Roman Carax, a young cinephile obsessed with documenting the corruption in Night City; Talia Yang, a free spirit who was raised in the corpo world but fell into the street gang Maelstrom; Weak Kingsley, a veteran edgerunner; and D, a nomadic netrunner. This new 10-episode series promises to be every bit as visually stunning, emotionally engaging, and delightfully dystopian as its predecessor. For decades, video game adaptations have been notoriously terrible. But, over the past five years or so, a bunch of great TV shows have broken that curse. Arcane on Netflix, The Last of Us on HBO, Fallout on Prime Video — some of the best shows on television are based on video games, or at least set in the world of a video game. Cyberpunk: Edgerunners is a prime example. Not only is it a worthy adaptation of the game; it might have even surpassed it.