Appropriately Questions the Future

Rating: Null/10 (1 November 2013)

Blade Runner left "Bigfoot" imprint on the science fiction genre 1982. Sci-fi flicks have a pattern of letdowns, but Blade Runner is something special, sustaining freshness when viewed in today's times. Ridley Scott's ambitious vision still questions the audience about the future when Blade Runner's version of "the future" is less than a decade away from our time. Scott, though not restricted to the sic-fi genre, unlocks the director's comfort zone and possibly his area of interest. He has a certain feel to his films that can be linked together and recognized through the auteur theory. Blade Runner also weighs on genre theory in it's attack of the humanity's future in the science fiction category.
The visuals for Blade Runner need not an extra injection of "film-botox", the release year doesn't concern itself with the picture's longevity. When making the decisions for Blade Runner, Scott has his mind in the future imagining what the decor would look like, the clothing that we may wear, and the technology that could corrupt us. The obvious, blue-glow to the photography is beautiful and doesn't feel as cheap as other futuristic tales display their films. The selection of shots and cuts are placed perfectly, including the closeups I love from Scott's films. The sound echoes all the gadgets and violence a neo-noir-sci-fi film can release.
Films that predict the future sometimes become cheeky and cryptic with what they want to say; thankfully Blade Runner sprints past those urges and gives its audience everything up front, though the quantity of what they have to spread is quite sizable. Will there eventually be a new race of humans? Are we becoming robots? Who is who? What makes us a human? What makes us a person? Can what we do change who we are? What are the limits of love? I'd even go as far to say Blade Runner hints around issues of race, homosexuality, and slavery. Ridley Scott is almost trying to ply open American's simple-minded views in 1982.
Blade Runner is as artful as you can be without becoming pretentious. It's a film requiring your attention, thought, and repeated viewings. Don't worry it's still fun to watch; it has cool action scenes and impeccable blocking. The characters are enriched with feelings of the real world, which adds another layer of identification for Blade Runner's audiences to latch onto. From 1982's eye view, it appeared that Ridley Scott wasn't an optimistic onlooker of the years yet to come. Maybe his opinions were influenced by a vision of his later career never topping his work with Blade Runner and 1979's Alien.
Rating: 9
Grade: A