Born from an age of scientific innovation and industrial revolution, cinema possesses a unique and indelible relationship with the steampunk movement. In Steampunk Film: A Critical Introduction, Robbie McAllister calls attention to a wave of films that collectively imagine alternative histories where technological development has been dramatically derailed from its canonical course. Used as a means to explore the complex development and identification of genres in new forms, this book places steampunk cinema under the microscope and questions how a series of high-profile and big-budgt films have repeatedly adopted identities that fantastically blend future and past through the representation of spectacularly anachronistic machinery. Traced across numerous cultural boundaries and the work of countless filmmakers who draw upon the movement's fetishism for worlds still powered by cogs, pistons and steam engines, McAllister questions how and why the film industry has so frequently acted as a stage for steampunk's retro-futuristic nostalgias. As the first monograph to consider cinema's unique relationship with steampunk, the book places this burgeoning genre in the context of ongoing debates within film theory; all which are used to investigate the movement's remarkable interest in reengineering historical technologies. Rather than acting as a niche subculture, McAllister argues that steampunk's proliferation in mainstream film-making reflects a mass-cultural desire to reassess contemporary relationships with technology and navigate the intense changes that the medium itself is experiencing in the twenty-first century. Book jacket.