Ridley Scott’s "Blade Runner" at 40:"It’s Quite an Experience to Live in Fear,” But as Roy Batty Teaches, Maybe We Don’t Have To. (original) (raw)
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PRESENT FUTURE. Some considerations about the programmatic context of Blade Runner 2049
The recent sequel to Ridley Scott's original work proposes some further insights into the field of dystopian imagery in the vision of a close society. The enigma, suggested, lies in the evident relationships between script and set design, between real and unreal, prediction and reality, dystopian and utopian, where architecture is not only an essential background, but a leading actor.
Blade Runners and the 21st Century
Film and Philosophy, 2019
In his essay, "The Replicant: Inside the Dark Future of Blade Runner 2049," Brian Raftery suggests that, "The strongest sci-fi has always used the landscape of the future to help us process our worries about the present…" 1 Similarly, Angelica Jade Bastién writes about Blade Runner 2049, and dystopias in general, that the genre, "should make us uncomfortable...make us question our roles…illuminate and critique current societal problems by reconfiguring them in an exaggerated, but still somewhat plausible context." 2 While this may be a lot to ask of any genre, I believe that the Blade Runner films wrestle with the problems of the present as much as they do with the future. In what follows, I argue that the Blade Runner series, and the criticism of it, serve as a barometer of American culture's continued struggle with ideas regarding biological determinism and social marginalization. The Blade Runner films are a special case, in that Blade Runner's handling of these themes, which made it a favorite with film theorists, has become anathema to many contemporary critics. The effort to address this tension in Blade Runner 2049 reveals the current philosophical discontent surrounding these issues. This essay reviews how Blade Runner addresses the general theme of biological determinism and marginalization, considers contemporary criticism of the film, illustrates Blade Runner 2049's engagement with the same issues, and discusses the subsequent criticism of that engagement.
Blade Runner: Los Ángeles 2019. Los dibujos de una ciudad en decadencia
EGA Revista de expresión gráfica arquitectónica, 2019
Tras el estreno de la película Blade Runner, dirigida en 1982 por el director británico Ridley Scott, se publicó “Blade Runner. Sketchbook”, un libro que recoge los bocetos y diseños conceptuales utilizados durante la preproducción de la película. Una publicación solo accesible para unos cuantos afortunados debido a su alto coste. Muchos años después se puede acceder a parte de esa publicación gratuitamente a través de determinadas plataformas web. En ella podemos encontrar, entre otros diseños, los primeros esbozos que se dibujaron de uno de sus protagonistas principales, la ciudad de Los Ángeles en el año 2019. En este artículo llevaremos a cabo un estudio de estos dibujos, los referentes que se emplearon, los protagonistas que formaron parte del proceso, el impacto que generaron y lo mucho que influyeron en el concepto de imagen de la ciudad del futuro en el cine.
Abstract A Study of the Impenetration of the Human and the Technological in Science Fiction Film: --Revisiting Blade Runner. Michael A. Unger Sogang University Graduate School of Media Ridley Scott’s prescient science fiction film Blade Runner (1982), thirty-three years after its initial release still marks a significant shift in the cyberpunk aesthetic and thematic changes of the notion of “alien” as “Other” within the science fiction film genre. This close analysis of the film re-examines how it offers a representation of the impenetration of the human and technology within the diegesis of the film through the notion of the “replicant”-- a technologically designed entity that exemplifies this fusion of the human and technology, creating a new subjectivity that collapses the boundaries between the human and machine. This re-reading also examines how the film reflects our relationship with technology in our contemporary, global information age. Key Words: cyborg, Blade Runner, impenetration, cyberpunk, technological l determinism, partial subjectivity,
The Nocturnal Future as Alienated Existence: Blade Runner
Dystopic works, cinematic and literary, often project onto an idealized past or imaginary future some spatio-temporal possibilities, which human intellectual and physical dynamics can explore and realize. Blade Runner (1982) by Ridley Scott inverts, in science-fiction style, the exalted aspirations of humankind for scientific and technological progress, and attacks the morality of futuristic capitalism. A careful analysis of the film will impart an amalgam of the past and the future, of film noir and classical science fiction and detective film genres in it. Moreover, the film incorporates Biblical, mythological, and philosophical leitmotifs to pass a serious comment on the modern state of the relations between technology and people, freedom and slavery, the meaning of life and death, the metropolis and people, and man and woman, drawing immensely on an a variety of retrospective and prospective apocalyptic literature. The present study analyzes the thematic and structural parallelisms between the film and apocalyptic works that focus on similar points. JEL Classification Codes: Z00.
In Blade Runner (1982) the distinction between being-in-itself and being-for-itself is problematized and ambiguated through the enigmatic and ambivalent phenomena of the Replicant, which lies somewhere between the category of man and machine, or subject and object, especially with the development of the Nexus-Six prototype with its capacity to develop more advanced emotional responses than previous generations of replicants. They are programmed by the Tyrell Corporation to ‘be more human than human’(Scott, 1982) as they possess a sentience sufficiently advanced and sophisticated for them to attain a poignant awareness of the circumscribed limits that bind them to a constricted mode of being. This takes the form of secondary and subjugated conditions as slaves to human beings as they perform menial and unpleasant tasks such as mining and prostitution in off-world colonies; as well as four-year mortalities which terminate them at the precise point at which they acquire sufficient experience to develop emotional faculties no different from those of human beings.