Released on June 25, 1982Directed by: Ridley Scott
Produced by: Michael Deeley
·Based loosely on Philip K. Dick’s novel “Do Androids Dream of Electric Sheep” The film takes place in a futuristic Los Angeles setting of which genetically engineered organic robots called replicants, are indistinguishable from real humans. They are banned from Earth and are used as slave labor in off-world colonies. However, many replicants defy the ban and return to Earth. Once detected, a special operative known as the “blade runner”, hunts them down and “retires” them. One group of defiant replicants are hiding in Los Angeles and the blade runner, Rick Deckard (Harrison Ford), has to hunt them down.
Most fans today would say that this movie was ahead of it's time. However, during its release date the Blade Runner was a box office flop. The production went over budget, and most of the film crew and cast were left frustrated and confused. Yet, over the years Blade Runner acquired a large cult following and film critics began to notice the brilliant and modern visual effects and design that were once too outlandish or bizarre.
The style of Blade Runner can trace its root back to the Film Noir genre. This genre of American film came from the 1940's and last in popularity throughout the 1960's. Most noir stories are based on detective novels and are low key in black and white. However, this film took the classic noir film and turned it into a science fiction movie. This combination helped to promote a new genre called Cyberpunk. This genre usually encompasses artificial intelligence, post-industrial dystopia cities, mega corporations, radical breakdown in social order, hackers, and everything within the realm of cybernetics.
The film is set to be in the dystopia vision of the future of Los Angeles in 2019. In fact, Blade Runner has been called one of the first films to give the viewer a loose yet real feel of modern day Los Angeles. One of the reasons for this is due to the locations that the film was shot at. For example, an epic chase seen between Deckard (Harrison Ford) and a replicant take place in an abandoned home in the futuristic Los Angeles. This building was the Bradbury Building in Hollywood. The picture on the left is a screen shot from Blade Runner. This is the police station where Deckard works. However, it is actually LA's Union Station!
Although the film and novel lack in overall congruency, they do however touch upon the same themes. Many experts have already established these themes and there are numerous books that discuss in detail, how these themes appear in the movie and in our modern era. The major themes are such: what is reality, what is humanity, more human than human, post-modernism and cyberpunk, religion and man playing God, poetry and song, and futuristic architectural landscapes. It is the question of what it is to be human that perhaps resonates the strongest between the two mediums. In the movie, Deckard's job is to kill replicants, yet he ends up falling in love with one, and is forced to confront is own sense of humanity.
Philip K. Dick began his novel after reading WWII archive journals and statements from the Nazis. "Dick had been granted access to archived World War II Gestapo documents in the University of California at Berkley, and had come across diaries written by S.S. men stationed in Poland, which he found almost unreadable in their casual cruelty and lack of human empathy. One sentence in particular troubled him: "We are kept awake at night by the cries of starving children." Dick was so horrified by this sentence that he reasoned there was obviously something wrong with the man who wrote it. This led him to hypothesize that Nazism in general was a defective group mind, a mind so emotionally flawed that the word human could not be applied to them; their lack of empathy was so pronounced that Dick reasoned they couldn't be referred to as human beings, even though their outward appearance seemed to indicate that they were human. The novel sprang from this (Source Link)" Therefore, the hero in the movie, Deckard, could actually be inferred as the replicant due to his lack of human empathy for the things he destroys.
Philip K. Dick began his novel after reading WWII archive journals and statements from the Nazis. "Dick had been granted access to archived World War II Gestapo documents in the University of California at Berkley, and had come across diaries written by S.S. men stationed in Poland, which he found almost unreadable in their casual cruelty and lack of human empathy. One sentence in particular troubled him: "We are kept awake at night by the cries of starving children." Dick was so horrified by this sentence that he reasoned there was obviously something wrong with the man who wrote it. This led him to hypothesize that Nazism in general was a defective group mind, a mind so emotionally flawed that the word human could not be applied to them; their lack of empathy was so pronounced that Dick reasoned they couldn't be referred to as human beings, even though their outward appearance seemed to indicate that they were human. The novel sprang from this (Source Link)" Therefore, the hero in the movie, Deckard, could actually be inferred as the replicant due to his lack of human empathy for the things he destroys.
