Blade Runner's 25th Anniversary: "Archeology of the Future" -A Galaxy Insight

"Man has made his match -Now it's his problem."

Original film poster for Ridley Scott's Blade Runner (1982).

The 45th New York Film Festival (which ends October 14th
screened a remastered edition dubbed "the final cut" of Ridley Scott's Blade Runner, the classic adaptation of Philip K. Dick's novel about artificial super-humans on the loose in a 2019 Los Angeles conceived by futurist design artist Syd Mead, influenced by the vision of Fritz Lang's Metropolis (1927) and Kubrick's 2001: A Space Odyssey.

The film's bleak, rain-slicked vision of Los Angeles fuels its enduring fascination for fans. Dubbed "a work of future archeology" by Ms. Bruno, Blade Runner is set in a hazy, monumental metropolis of perpetual, rain-slick nighttime of impending doom. Harrison Ford's dour replicant-killing hero, Rick Deckard, weaves through crowds at street-level and flies in an air-car to the monolithic, pyramid-like home of the Tyrell Corporation, creators of artificial intelligence -reminiscent of Nazi architect Albert Speer's designs for the Third Reich.

Deckard, a former police officer/bounty hunter, is reluctantly dispatched by the state to search for four android replicants (robotic NEXUS models) that have been created with limited life spans limited to four years -a built-in fail-safe mechanism in case they became too human. The genetically-engineered renegades have escaped from enslaving conditions on an Off-World outer planet. Driven by fear, they have come to Earth to locate their creator life-extending retooling and force him to prolong their short lives.

The film's theme, the difficult quest for immortality, is supplemented by an ever-present eye motif - there are various VK eye tests, an Eye Works factory, and other symbolic references to eyes as being the window to the soul. Scott and Dick's masterpiece asks the veritable question: what does it mean to be truly human?

Amplifying the dark vision of Philip K. Dick's short novel Do Androids Dream of Electric Sheep? Blade Runner ventures that anyone who can afford the trip has abandoned Earth for an obscure distant colony after a catastrophic but undiscussed world war. The home planet is now inhabited only by the infirm and the poor—and by a handful of androids soon slated to die.

"Aren't we all replicants now?" Giuliana Bruno, a professor of film and visual culture at Harvard University, asked at the panel discussion, titled "The Future Is Now: Blade Runner at 25." In a world of rapid technological innovation that affects not only how we live but how we think and remember."
"The physicality is so sensual because it's informed by impending death," a Stanford University professor, Scott Bukatman, said during the panel discussion. Like the paradoxical existence of the replicants — god-like but more mortal than humans — he plight of those replicants, always subject to verification as "real," also creates an environment of doubt. It's at once unsettling and deeply human, echoing Bruno's question: "Aren't we all replicants now?"

The world-weary protagonist of the book is a bitter bounty hunter named Rick Deckard, played by Harrison Ford. The real hero is Roy Batty, played by Rutger Hauer leader of the android pack of “skin jobs” who have thus far eluded their police pursuers and are now back on terra firma. Their quest is noble, but in vain, and most of them die at Deckard’s hands, as all living things and all things that aspire to life must die, including Roy, a postmodern Prometheus: “All those moments will be lost in time, like tears in rain.”

"Blade Runner' reminds us of these questions that are no longer asked: the condition of being human, fitting in a society," Mr. Bukatman said. In contrast the Philip Dick's suspicions about the nature of reality and technology, today's science fiction, "those questions are not being raised. And we have become far more comfortable with the technologies we were so suspicious of 25 years ago — more comfortable but not more knowledgeable."

Posted by Casey Kazan