When I saw Blade Runner for the first time, I might have been 13 or 14. I'd been watching Star Trek for two years by this time and my experience with science fiction was of a utopian society that peacefully explored the galaxy seeking friendship. Everything was clean and precise and roomy- very rarely does anyone on the Starship Enterprise bump elbows with anyone else. Culturally, it was a time of extreme paranoia about nuclear war and the survival of mankind seemed slim. My taste for post-apocalyptic fiction also stems from this time frame. Blade Runner was a revelation; it was the first time i had a seen a future world that was not a wish-fulfilling fantasy but one that seemed to be based on fact, precedent and a keen attention to the detail and direction of our lives.
List of articles on the internet with notes.
Roger Ebert
"This is a seminal film, building on older classics like "Metropolis"
(1926) or "Things to Come," but establishing a pervasive view of the
future that has influenced science fiction films ever since. Its key legacies are: Giant global corporations, environmental decay,
overcrowding, technological progress at the top, poverty or slavery at
the bottom -- and, curiously, almost always a film noir vision. Look at "
Dark City," "Total Recall," "
Brazil," "
12 Monkeys" or "
Gattaca" and you will see its progeny.
The biggest change Scott made in earlier versions was to drop the
voice-over narration from the 1982 original. Spoken by Ford, channeling
Philip Marlowe, it explained things on behalf of a studio nervous that
we wouldn't understand the film.
The skies are always dark with airborne filth in this Los Angeles of the
future. It usually rains. The infrastructure looks a lot like now,
except older and more crowded, and with the addition of vast floating
zeppelins, individual flying cars, and towering buildings of
unimaginable size. When I first saw the film I was impressed by the
giant billboards with moving, speaking faces on them, touting Coca-Cola
and other products. Now I walk over to Millennium Park and see giant
faces looming above me, smiling, winking, and periodically spitting (but
not Coke). As for the flying cars, these have been a staple of sci-fi
magazine covers for decades, but remain wildly impractical and
dangerous, unless locked into a control grid.
And I continue to find it fascinating how film noir, a genre born in the
1940s, has such a hammerlock on the future (look at "Dark City" again).
"
Roger Ebert June 2, 1982
"This basic story comes from a
Philip K. Dick
novel with the intriguing title, "Do Androids Dream of Electric Sheep?"
The book examined the differences between humans and thinking machines,
and circled warily around the question of memory: Does it make an
android's personal memories less valid if they are inspried by someone
else's experiences -- especially if the android does not know that?
The special effects were supervised by
Douglas Trumbull, whose credits include "
2001: A Space Odyssey" and "
Silent Running,"
and who is about as good as anyone in the world at using miniatures,
animation, drawings, optical effects and other ways of tricking the eye.
The visual environments he creates for this film are wonderful to
behold, and there's a sense of detail, too; we don't just get the
skyways and the monolithic skyscrapers and the sky-taxis, we also get
notions about how restaurants, clothes and home furnishing will look in
2020 (not too different). "Blade Runner" is worth attending just to
witness this artistry."
Roger Eber 1992
"One of the benefits of home video is that it sometimes allows the director to have the last word - if not sooner, then later.
Sometimes the changes are minor - a few more nude scenes, or longer
dialogue. Sometimes they are substantial, as in the new director's
version of Ridley Scott's “
Blade Runner” (1982), which is playing in theaters on its way to home video. Scott has abandoned the
Harrison Ford narration of the original version, added some moments to the love affair between Ford and
Sean Young,
fleshed out a few other scenes and, most notably, provided what he
describes as a “somewhat bleaker ending.” This is, he says, the version
he would have released in 1982 if he could have. The Ford narration was
added because the studio feared audiences would not understand his story
of a futuristic Los Angeles. The new ending, which is ironic and
inconclusive and gives Ford an existentialist exit line, was of course
dropped by studio executives for a more standard violent outcome.
around the skirts of the billion-dollar towers, the city at ground level looks like a third-world bazaar.
And yet the world of “Blade Runner” has undeniably become one of the
visual touchstones of modern movies. The movie's Los Angeles, with its
permanent dark cloud of smog, its billboards hundreds of feet high, its
street poverty living side by side with incredible wealth, may or may
not come true - but there aren't many 10-year-old movies that look more
prophetic now than they did at the time."
Eric Haywood 2014
""Blade Runner" is commonly regarded as one of the greatest science
fiction films of all time, and you won’t have to look very hard to find
any number of awards, nominations, and rave reviews the film has
garnered. Its gorgeous cinematography and production design have
influenced countless other films, and, in 1994, it was selected by the
Library of Congress for preservation in the U.S. Film Registry as being
“culturally, historically, or aesthetically significant.”
but despite Ridley Scott’s admission that Deckard is himself a
replicant (an interpretation of the film that I never quite got on board
with)
Ultimately, pretty much every action that can be described as “good” or
“noble” in "Blade Runner" is done by Roy. All he wants for himself and
his merry band of replicants is the same thing any of us want: more
life. As much as possible. And although he’s not above killing in
pursuit of his goal, Roy’s not some bloodthirsty rage-monster who
delights in human suffering. In fact, I would argue that if there had
been a way for Roy to get what he wanted without harming anyone, he
certainly would have taken that option."
Mark Kermode, The Guardian, 2015
"Having flopped in 1982,
Blade Runner took years to find an audience, and to find itself – this
“Final Cut”
from 2007 supersedes an earlier “Director’s Cut”, cleaning up assorted
blips (verbal, visual) in addition to stripping the tacked-on voiceover
and dopey “happy ending” which marred the original release. Back on the
big screen,
Blade Runner remains an overwhelming experience,
with Doug Trumbull’s photographic effects and Larry Paull’s production
designs melding seamlessly with location shots of downtown LA to create a
groundbreaking “retro-fitted” future. Vangelis’s glistening score is
all landscape synths, tingling strings and yearning romantic melodies,
while Syd Mead’s vehicles drive the action delightfully. But in the end
Hauer’s eyes have it – gazing into a future already lost in the past;
shimmering, piercing, undying."
On the Edge of Blade Runner, making of documentary
Rita Kempley, Washington Post, 1992
Scott, a provocative visual stylist, brought terms like cyberpunk and
retrofitting into the American vocabulary with this voluptuously
decadent, sensor-overloaded portrait of Los Angeles as it might be in
2019: crowded, polluted, clangorous, damp, desperate and diverse. Patrol
cars called Spinners carom through the canyons created by skyscrapers
400 stories tall and crumbling in the acid rain. Millions have migrated
to off-world colonies, the spacious glories of which are incessantly
touted by blimpy flying billboards. The rainbow billions left behind
squeeze through the jammed, littered, neon-splattered streets as numb to
hope as they are to the noise.
Grand enough in scale to carry its many Biblical and mythological
references, "Blade Runner" never feels heavy or pretentious -- only more
and more engrossing with each viewing. It helps, too, that it works as
pure entertainment. In its soul, it's a detective story complete with a
glossy dame and a Chandler-style gumshoe suffering from a case of
hard-boiled heartburn. Like Bogey before him, Deckard must shake off the
troubles he's seen, the numbing shell, to get back in touch with his
feelings. He becomes human again thanks primarily to the replicants who
are driven by love for one another to develop empathy.
The filmmaker also has expanded on the unicorn references, which he
says "provoke Deckard's doubts in his own essence." The blade runner has
just confronted Rachel with the fact that her memories are not really
hers, but implants borrowed from Tyrell's niece. When she storms out of
his home -- Frank Lloyd Wright's Ennis Brown house -- Deckard gets out
the family album, no longer sure of his own past. There's also his
sidekick, police lieutenant Gaff, and his origami animals -- a unicorn, a
stick man and a chicken among them -- which serve as a running
commentary on the evolution of Deckard's character.
Gaff
(Edward James Olmos) is an interesting specimen, which may not be as
evident on video versions of the film. He's a walking melting pot with
blue irises in his almond-shaped eyes and pocked Asian skin weakened by
the filthy air and stress of living in the 21st century. He speaks a
patois of Japanese, Spanish and English, a language that reflects the
true, and as it has turned out prophetic, ethnic makeup of the City of
Angels."
Empire magazine review,
"
Plot
Los Angeles, 2019. Bounty
hunter Rick Deckard (Ford) is told to terminate four dangerous
synthetic beings, or ‘replicants’, led by Roy Batty (Hauer). As the
pursuit becomes increasingly brutal, the line between human and machine
is blurred.
One of Scott’s great strengths as a filmmaker is his impeccable sense of
taste, and that, it seems, extends to his subsequent treatment of his
films. The Final Cut is not an excuse for the pointless and indulgent
reintroduction of deservedly binned scenes (see Coppola’s Apocalypse
Now: Redux), or
ex post facto fiddle-faddling (Spielberg’s timid removal of the guns in E. T.)
But it’s actually the passing of time that’s wrought more changes on the
movie than Scott’s loving tinkering. All movies date, and
science-fiction movies are inevitably more prone to the signs of ageing
than any other genre. The innovations that filmmakers imagine stubbornly
don’t, in fact, transpire (flying cars), while unheard-of inventions
become everyday (mobile phones). Deckard’s zooming in on details of a
photograph was an unthinkable leap of technological imagination in 1982,
but now it looks like he’s working on an early shareware version of
Photoshop. Meanwhile, the luminous green displays and clunky keyboards -
apparently there are no mice in the future - look suspiciously like
they’ve been cannibalised from a job-lot of BBC Acorns. Presumably Scott
could have digitally ripped them out and installed replacements, but
those too would inevitably date. Instead he sticks with the originals,
giving the film a rich, Gilliamesque feel, in which old technology rubs
shoulders with the new.
Verdict
Scott
has said, “Why watch a film seven times? Because someone’s done it
right and transported you to its world.” This retooling makes the film
worth an eighth trip, and more. Not a case of Blade Runner Redux, but
Blade Runner Deluxe."
Books:
"Future Noir: the making of blade runner by Paul Sammon
ISBN-13: 978-0061053146
Retrofitting Blade Runner by Judith Kerman
ISBN-13: 978-0879725105
Blade Runner bibliography
Bad reviews of the movie
""Blade Runner, like its setting, is a beautiful, deadly organism that devours life."
(Richard Corliss, Time)"
cult classic
"
NYTimes review, final cut
"
What’s hypnotic about the film is its seamless portrait of the
future, a sleek retro Deco glossed on neon-laced decay: overcrowded
cities roamed by hustlers, strugglers and street gangs mumbling a
multicultural argot, the sky lit by giant corporate logos and video
billboards hyping exotic getaways on other planets, where most
English-speaking white people seem to have fled.
Mr. Scott
designed this world in minute detail and shot it at night, from oblique
angles, mainly on Warner Brothers’ back lot in Burbank, Calif., pumping
in smoke and drizzling in rain.
“I’ve never paid quite so much
attention to a movie, ever,” Mr. Scott said in a telephone interview
from Washington, where he’s shooting a spy thriller. “But we had to
create a world that supported the story’s premise, made it believable.
Why do you watch a film seven times? Because somebody’s done it right
and transported you to its world.”
When “Blade Runner” came out in June 1982 it received mixed reviews and lost money. The summer’s big hit was “E. T.,”
Steven Spielberg’s
tale of a cute alien phoning home from the tidy suburbs. Few wanted to
watch a movie that implied the world was about to go drastically
downhill.
“Here we are 25 years on,” Mr. Scott said, “and we’re
seriously discussing the possibility of the end of this world by the end
of the century. This is no longer science fiction.”
Kurt Loder for MTV review
studio criticism
Siskel and Ebert review, 1982, video
Ebert: pretty predictable paces, didn't find it convincing, loved
special effects of futuristic LA, half way through stopped caring about
people,
siskel: predictable,cliched, story goes no
place, striking to look at, likes harrison ford, I've wasted my time.
special effects itself doesn't make it worth seeing.
ebert: technically good, attractive to look at which took me through the end.
ebert: thumbs up, siskel: thumbs down
Joseph M. Reagle Jr.
"
Perhaps the most important aspect of the recently released
director's cut is the footage of Deckard's dream. He dreams of a unicorn. This is directly
referenced at the ending in which another blade runner, Graff, leaves an origami Unicorn
outside Deckard's door to signify that he is allowing Deckard to escape with Rachael. By
this inclusion, Scott lends weight to the "Deckard as a replicant" concept by
implying that another blade runner knew Deckard's dreams. Nor was Scott above playing with
words as seen by the fact that Deckard "retires" (kills) Replicants, after he
himself is brought back from retirement.[6]
"
Library of Analysis: Blade Runner
The Least Scary Option
"The film's postmodernist tendencies have also been detailed extensively by such writers as Giulliana Bruno and David Harvey
.
Most obvious is the film's use of postmodern pastiche: the film's
production design emphasises the coexistence of multiple historical
influences and styles, particularly of architecture. The urban decay and
retrofitting shows the acceleration of industrial processes and
recycling (which Bruno characterises as the process of becoming reliant
upon one's own waste
)
under late capitalism. Harvey is quick to note that the production of
replicant's individual parts has been outsourced to street vendors,
which extends the process of industrial devolution and flexible flows of
capital found in post-Fordist economies
.
The replicants' four year life spans (offset, claims Tyrell, by the
intensity of their lives) are suggestive of the accelerated experience
of life under postmodernism. The film's ruminations on the nature of
memory (and the importance of photographs) evoke postmodern ideas about
the mediation of life through technology and the elimination of "real"
history. The film has also been suggested as one of the principal
inspirations for the "cyberpunk" genre of science fiction
.
Insofar as it marries noir to images of futuristic dystopia, this seems
fair enough. Less convincing, though, are attempts to describe
Deckard's examination of the photograph as suggesting the idea of
cyberspace
;
it seems more inspired by the scenes of technological detection found
in Michelangelo Antonioni's Blowup (1966) or Francis Ford Coppola's The
Conversation (1974)."
Worn down Hell
"Director Ridley Scott's mesmerising imagery conveys an age of fear and
despair, apathy and alienation - a future without a future. Contrary to
many classical dystopias, the horrifying message is seldom explicit.
Scott utilises the full strenght of the visual media.
What makes the society in Blade Runner so frightening is that it
resembles our own. Just like Neuromancer and other cyberpunk dystopias,
Blade Runner does not predict change, but escalation. Every negative
tendency in our time has been amplified.
Environmental collapse
Blade Runner was not the first dystopian depiction which illustrated the possible impact of environmental problems, but
possibly the most effective.
The scenery conveys a seriously disturbed environment, the subtle
horror of approaching apocalypse. The hot and damp weather, the polluted
skies, the acid rains - it is evident the environment is near a
complete collapse. Mankind has played a game with high stakes and lost -
now it is paying the price.
There are many conceivable explanations how this alarming situation
may have arised: nuclear, chemical and biological wars, grand-scale
terrorism, global warming, merciless exploitation, excessive pollution,
exhaustive over-population; probably a combination of them all. The way
the Tyrell Corporation and other commercial enterprises are presented in
the movie suggests the mega-corporations are to blame, though.
Terminal decay
Blade Runner's most striking and at the same time most terrifying
theme is the decay: omnipresent, irreversible, terminal. The cities are
slowly turning into gigantic refuse dumps. The dark streets are filled
with old newspapers, rottening fast food dispensers, used gums,
cigarette-ends, broken spare parts, electronic junk and kipple. The
automatic street-sweepers fight in vain.
All interiors in the movie, with the exception of the luxurious
interiors of the Tyrell Pyramid, are filled with gadgetry and junk, some
of it evidently several decades old. One come to think of "shortage
societies" like the Soviet Union and its satellite states. It seems
evident all resources have been allocated to the Off-world colonies and
Earth has been left behind, left to die. Cobbled-together mechanics and
electronics which once were temporary have become permanent, and there
is probably a desperate need of spare parts.
Police state tendencies
Debatedly, the movie conveys a society on the verge of becoming a
police state. Blade Runner is flirting with old-fashioned totalitarian
dystopias, most notably Nineteen Eighty-four, but only on a superficial
level, e.g. the starring eye at the beginning of the movie. Although
LAPD hardly can be compared to the Thoughtpolice, the flying squad cars
seem to be everywhere, controlling the air and perhaps also monitoring
the citizens.
Increased corporate power
Advertising, most notably neon signs and video billboards, is
ever-present. Ironically, the video billboards only seem to advertise
foreign products: USA itself has become a victim of junk culture and
economic imperialism.
Consequently, the corporations have increased their power; the executive
boards of the mega-corporations may be the real governments of the
world. In the cyberpunk tradition, the corporations may even have their
own police forces, armies, cities, codes of laws etcetera; we cannot
take this for granted in Blade Runner, though. But the corporations do
express their power, by adopting neo-aristocratic manners and building
monstrous buildings, insipid monuments over soulless commercialism in a
dying world.
Escalated urbanisation
Los Angeles is a true mega-city. Perhaps the strong developement
towards urbanisation has escalated; perhaps the population is fleeing
radiation and anarchy on the countryside. Be that as it may: the urban
areas are over-crowded. The logical result of over-population in such a
large city would be shortage of living quarters and redundance of
manpower: the living and working conditions of the common man might be
close to unbearable.
The over-crowded streets display a wide array of ethnicities,
nationalities, religions, cultures and sub-cultures. The American
society has finally become truly multi-cultural - was it not for the
fact it had ceased to be a culture a long time ago.
The street dwellers in the movie are apathetic and indifferent.
Deckard is assaulted and brutalised by Leon in an alley. Zhora is hunted
like an animal through the streets by Deckard, who makes no attempt to
conceal his weapon. There are plenty of bypassers and spectators who not
only fail to interfere, but even to react at all. The mega-city seem to
have killed the inhabitants with its anonymity and gloominess, and
vaporised any trace of empathy and compassion in their souls. They have
become isolated, barren islands in a frozen ocean of concrete and steel.
Dubious space colonisation programme
Man has finally reached the stars, but it seems to be a questionable
project. The purpose is probably to avoid further over-population and
exhaustion of Earth's resources. One may speculate if there is another
purpose as well, a semi-conscious one: Man's homeworld cannot be saved
and interstellar migration is the only option.
"I look at the signs for emigration to the Colonies... If it's really so
great Off-world, how come they gotta advertise? If you've got something
really good, you keep it a secret. It's only the junk you push."
Dehumanising technology
A classical dystopian thesis is that technological progress might be
hazardous. Few, if any, dystopian depictions explore this thesis more
fervently than Blade Runner.
In Blade Runner, advanced technology is profoundly present. It almost
seem like the inhabitants of this future society have adapted to the
technology, not vice versa: the machines have become subjects instead of
objects.
Distorted humanity concept
In Blade Runner, the line between man and machine has not only been
blurred, but erased. As artificial beings can be made completely
sentient, the mystery and magic of creating life is forever gone;
science is now competing with nature and metaphysics. The famous slogan
of the Tyrell Corporation holds the new order:
More human than human.
Deteroriating morals and ethics
One of the most interesting aspects of dystopian fiction (and at the
same time one of the most elusive aspects) is the distortion or even
destruction of morals and ethics. In fact, it is possibly the most
importent aspect of dystopian fiction. Illustrative examples are
Nineteen Eighty-four and Brave New world."
Written by
Niclas Hermansson
More critical essays
NY Times review, Janet Maslin, 2015
"''Blade Runner'' is crammed to the gills with much more information than it can hold.
Science-fiction devotees may find ''Blade Runner'' a wonderfully
meticulous movie and marvel at the comprehensiveness of its vision. Even
those without a taste for gadgetry cannot fail to appreciate the degree
of effort that has gone into constructing a film so ambitious and
idiosyncratic. The special effects are by Douglas Trumbull, Richard
Yuricich and David Dryer, and they are superb. So is Laurence G. Paull's
production design. But ''Blade Runner'' is a film that special effects
could have easily run away with, and run away with it they have."
Do Androids Dream of Electric Sheep? Guardian review 2012
"
This novel is the source text for Ridley Scott's dystopian masterpiece
Blade Runner,
and it's to Philip K Dick's considerable credit that neither book nor
film seem dated. Indeed, barely a year goes by without the arrival of
some technological advance that makes the future dreamed up by Dick in
1968 seem closer. Hovercars may be a while off, but video calls and
genetic modifications are firmly in the here and now.
The very first
pages introduce "mood-organs", dialled up to suppress or stimulate
feelings among a needy population. It's difficult not to compare them to
the internet: always on, always accessible, never quite real.
That this fantastic book bears scrutiny nearly 45 years on is proof that, with
...Electric Sheep,
Philip K Dick was at the height of his powers."
Dreams of Postmodernism and Thoughts of Mortality: A Twenty-Fifth Anniversary Retrospective of Blade Runner
Google Scholar results: https://scholar.google.co.nz/scholar?hl=en&q=Blade+Runner&btnG=&as_sdt=1%2C5
1. Strick, Phillip. "Blade Runner Telling The Difference:
Does the director's cut show that Deckard is a
replicant?" Sight and Sound. (12/2/92) p. 8.
2. Deutelbaum, Marshall. "Memory/Visual Design: The
Remembered Sights of Blade Runner" Literature/Film
Quarterly (17.1) 1989 : 66 - 72.
3. Dresser, David. "Blade Runner. Science Fiction &
Transcendence" Literature/Film Quarterly (18.1) 1990 :
172 - 178.
4. Morrison, Rachela. "Casablanca Meets Star Wars: The
Blakean Dialectics of Blade Runner" Literature/Film
Quarterly (18.1) 1990 : 2 - 9.
5. Slade, Joseph. "Romanticizing Cybernetics in Ridley
Scott's Blade Runner" Literature/Film Quarterly (18.1)
1990 : 11 - 18.
Influence on other movies and media:
The ShadowZone blog: Thirty years later
"
Perhaps the first and most noticeable aspect of Blade Runner is the breadth and scope of its visuals. Blade Runner
goes beyond the beck-and-call of visual wonder, and literally immerses
you into a world so unlike our own, and yet so similar. It’s one thing
to take an already existing city, one that’s alive, and film it. It’s
another to not only actually and literally build one from the ground up
but to make it feel alive. In the majority of (sci-fi) films, when watching, one feels merely like an outsider looking into a fictional world. With Blade Runner, you actually feel like you are in their world, a part of it, experiencing it.
“It is no surprise at
all that the style, the artefact [sic] designs and the scene designs
have been copied… we labled [sic] our assembly style ‘retro-deco’ and
added the additional label of ‘trash-chic’.” –
Syd Mead
Blade Runner is what we call “retrofitted”. It’s the prime example of a used future. In short: everything looks like it has a history.
From the retro 1950s look (tech-noir) to the futuristic vision, the Los
Angeles of 2019 is palpable precisely because it feels like everything
has a past, from the cars, to the buildings, to the people. Think of a
rundown Detroit, or of ancient ruins and older architectural designs
coexisting with the new. This is opposed to pretty much every sci-fi
film today which has a sleek and polished look via CGI. In Blade Runner,
the atmosphere of the city, alone, just oozes out. You can feel the
rain. You can smell the streets. It doesn’t have to be 3D for one to
interact with it on a purely cerebral level.
From the atmospheric scene in the animal market to basking in the sun’s
rays at the top of the world, from Deckard’s apartment in the sky to
Leon’s decrepit room, Blade Runner seamlessly combines the old and new, real and fake, together with a blend of cultures, into something now.
What also helps is the normalcy of it all. No sun, a host of engineered
animals (and humans), etc., and nobody bats an eye (so to speak). This
is their world. The real 2019 is only seven years away. While it’s
impossible to imagine the real L.A. looking like the one in the movie in
seven years, it’s not impossible to believe it.
Described as a visual futurist, Syd Mead was an instrumental force in
the creation of the visionary and visually wondrous world of Blade Runner. His method is almost a summation of why the City of Los Angeles, 2019, in the movie, seems so real.
The future L.A., like its present-day counterpart, is a city made up of
a past, living in a present, and heading towards an unknown future.
Indeed, his concept art alone could have generated the amount of
enthusiastic futuristic art.
But the attitude of rebellion is most present in the replicants. Seeming
human beings who wish to defy their very nature and defy death itself.
They seem alive in a world that seems existentially-dead. Their
rebelliousness is not only against their very nature, but against the
system itself. The illustration becomes obvious when Roy Batty murders
their “father”, their designer, Dr. Eldon Tyrell; a primary symbol for
authority, in general, in the film, not just as the “patriarch” of the
replicants.
The city depicted as Los Angeles 2019 is the result of a massive
consensual memory, both the memory that created it, and the memory that
lives in the audience’s mind, the nostalgia. Most things that require
progression, such as history, economies, societies, ideas, and cities,
are but the greatest of triumphs of collective human memory. Everything
is built on something previous, things that preexist, and are the
outcome of human memory. Memory ends up being one of the key themes in
this film, and also relies on perception, change, and control to ask
questions.
Stephen Spielberg (of whom I’m not the biggest fan) said: “Minority Report
is a different film. There’s darkness to it. There’s personal tragedy
as well. But I think it’s a little more accessible. I thought Ridley
[Scott, director of Blade Runner] painted a very bleak but
brilliant vision of life on earth in a few years. It’s kind of acid rain
and sushi. In fact, it’s coming true faster than most science fiction
films come true. Blade Runner is almost upon us. It was ultranoir.”
Zack Snyder (again, not the biggest fan): “I first saw
Blade Runner
when I was 16. It rocked my world. All those incredible images were
burned into my psyche.
It’s one of those movies you can’t help but
quote, an involuntary reference source that will be recycled throughout
cinema forever. It’s like a lesson from the master saying, ‘Go out into
the world and do good.’”
"
http://cinemaddicts.org/blog/2007/11/23/blade-runner-the-most-influential-science-fiction-movie-of-the-1980s/
"
Blade Runner is arguably the most influential science fiction movie of the 1980’s. Unlike
Star Wars, which was the most influential sci-fi movie of the 1970’s,
Blade Runner was a thinking person’s version of sci-fi, a sort of
2001; A Space Odyssey for the 80’s.
Blade Runner is the quintessential paradigm-shifting film. Like
2001,
it does so by a combination of effects, a depth and intelligence in
both its writing and direction, and by presenting a story unlike any
seen before.
First, the movie helped to bring a hitherto unknown science fiction
author, Phillip K. Dick, to light. PKD has provided the foundation for a
string of popular science fiction movies, including (in no particular
order);
Minority Report, Blade Runner, A Scanner Darkly, Imposter, Screamers, Total Recall, Next, and several others. Although
Blade Runner was bastardized (some, including me, would say markedly improved) from the book
Do Androids Dream of Electric Sheep,
the movie helped to solidify PKD’s pre-eminent status as the most
influential science fiction writer of the late 20th and early 21st
Centuries.
Second, the movie introduced a key concept that would become
increasingly important in movies, that of the intelligent android that
was virtually indistinguishable from the humans who created it. The
newest version of the series,
Battlestar Galactica (reviewed
elsewhere in this blog) has one of the main plot elements of the story
the fact that 13 of the cylon models are almost indistinguishable from
the humans that they seek to destroy.
This plot device is also at the root of one of the most controversial questions that has had
Blade Runner
“scholars” arguing for several years; the question of whether Deckard
is or is not actually a replicant himself. Purists, such as myself, say
no. Revisionists point to the newer releases of the film, such as the
first “Directors Cut” which appears to show a tapeto-retinal sheen (the
medical term for the yellow reflection seen in the back of the eyes of
cats and some birds) in Deckard’s eyes near the end of the film.
Thirdly,
Blade Runner introduced a different sort of atmosphere to the science fiction film. Instead of the clean, white and gray sets of the
Star Wars universe, the world of
Blade Runner
was foreign, dirty, hazy and filled with darkly clouded skies and
constant rain. In short, the earth of the future was not a very
hospitable place, and this atmosphere provided much of the tension,
confusion and fear contained within the film. In short,
Blade Runner was one of the first science fiction films to present a future world that was a dystopia, rather than a utopia.
Blade Runner was also, if interviews with
Harrision Ford and Ridley Scott are to be believed, a VERY difficulty
movie to make. Difficult, perhaps, because nothing like it had ever
been done before. As such, there was no way to say to the cast, “I want
this scene to look like
Casablanca, only better,” or “you know, like the chariot race in
Ben-Hur. . . .”
".
http://herocomplex.latimes.com/uncategorized/ridley-scott-blade-runner/
"Then, famously, the history of the film took a sharp turn away from
ignominy. First, the advent of the home-video era brought the movie to a
wider audience, one that was increasingly attuned to the film’s
cyberpunk visions and its technological concepts. Then, close to the
film’s 10th anniversary, a so-called director’s cut was given a
theatrical run in Los Angeles and broke revival-house records.
“It’s quite a thing to come back to this film now, after all this time,
after a quarter of a century,” said Scott, whose résumé includes
“Thelma & Louise,” “Gladiator“ and
“Black Hawk Down.” “This is a film that, in many ways, has echoed throughout popular culture in a very special way.”
Rutger Hauer, the Dutch actor who played the menacing but poetic killer android called
Roy Batty,
talks about how the movie “captured a vision of the future that to this
day holds up. That’s quite an achievement. It was a film all of us knew
was going to be special. A lot of that is because of Ridley.”
Watching “Blade Runner: The Final Cut,” anyone who lives in Los
Angeles today would be struck by how prescient the film was about the
direction of society and culture. To
Edward James Olmos, the film, set in 2019, amounted to a crystal ball in many of its details.
“What you see now is how unique this image of Los Angeles is and, in
hindsight, how correctly it predicted so much, such as the mix of urban
Latino and Asian cultural influences in the city,” said Olmos, who
portrayed a taciturn cop in the movie. “About the only thing in the film
we haven’t gotten yet is those flying cars.”
L.A. today perhaps isn’t quite the blow-torch skyline and acid-rain
megalopolis of “Blade Runner,” but the film certainly created standard
images and codified themes for several generations of science fiction
films. It’s hard to watch such movies as “
The Matrix,” “
The Terminator,” “
The Fifth Element” or “
Minority Report” (which was also based on Dick’s writing) and not see links to “Blade Runner.”
MTV,
cyber-punk fashion, graphic novels and even some architecture have
pulled elements from the visual accomplishments of “Blade Runner.”
"
h
historical events and figures instead of fish. tunnels through time.
Shark Reef Aquarium at Mandalay Bay Hotel, Las Vegas, NV
