Bladerunner - is this vision of the future really so bad?

[Kostmayer]

Reading the "What movies do you rewatch" thread brought up some thoughts I had when I first saw Bladerunner.

I know I was probably missing the point at the time, but I kind of thought the vision of the future portrayed in Bladerunner seemed kind of cool. Huge buildings, living space abundant due to off world migration, flying cars, robotic animals that are cheaper then their real life counterparts. And, well, I like the rain

Don't get me wrong, I also loved the Utopian vision portrayed in Star Trek: TNG, and hope to see something like that realised someday, though I doubt the politics of the future will be anything like that. I just remember seeing Bladerunner and thinking that I couldn't wait.

Course, like most films, it overestimated the progression of technology somewhat, although the Replicants aside, most of the technology in the movie isn't that far out of reach. And I think its a fairly accurate portrayal of future America.

 

[j d worthington]

Um, I think you'd better take another look at Blade Runner on this... it's a very dystopian future. There really wasn't abundant living space, the offword colonization was something that was being pushed to ease overpopulation, the living space there was (unless you were someone like Tyrell) was in buildings that were literally falling apart, and corporations owned you from the day you were born to the day you died... or else it was "root, hog, or die". Crime was rampant, but the police were so overburdened and understaffed that most of it was simply not paid attention to -- and even with that, remember Bryant's comment: "If you're not cop, you're little people!" Not to mention that a society which can, without any ethical qualms, biologically engineer and "create" human beings as slave labor with built-in expiration dates, doesn't exactly sound like a future where "human rights" have much of a chance in general.....

 

[Kostmayer]

Oh, I've watched it many a time since with older eyes since, and I know its not exactly an optimistic vision of the future. I just don't see it as being that much worse then things are now.

 

[Mighty mouse]

Is the argument that the present makes the dystopian depiction of the future in 1982 seem not just non dystopian but positively cool? a la the Zee Zee Top song, "I've been down so long I don't know what up is like" or is it that technology is a wonderful cocoon and the rest doesn't really matter?

 

[steve12553]

Is the argument that the present makes the dystopian depiction of the future in 1982 seem not just non dystopian but positively cool? a la the Zee Zee Top song, "I've been down so long I don't know what up is like" or is it that technology is a wonderful cocoon and the rest doesn't really matter?

Oh, we definitely hide in technology. We ignore a lot of things as long as we have our internet, our HDTV and our Ipods. Bladerunner is an interesting movie but I wouldn't not to live there.

 

[tangaloomababe]

Its got Rutger Hauer and Harrison Ford, so I ask you whats so bad...Ok its seems to be raining all the time. No chance of droughts anyway

 

[Steve Jordan]

I think you're thinking of this from the perspective of Ford's character Deckard, which is expected... he lives above the "little people," and at the end, he gets the girl and flies away. For him, life is good.

But clearly the rest of the population, like J.F. Sebastion, was living in squalor and poverty, sucking in the carbon monoxide that leaves the air permanently hazed, knee-deep in garbage and elbow-to-elbow with everyone else... and Sebastion was a programmer, probably one of the better-off of most people!

Nope, not the place for me, I think.

 

[iansales]

Was he living in squalor? He had the entire Bradbury Building to himself! From what I remember of the book, offworld emigration had left great swathes of cities unpopulated, so housing was readily available for nothing. In Jeter's sequels (to the film, not to Dick's original novel), there are shanty towns and slums, but they're outside the cities. On, and on Mars.

 

[Steve Jordan]

And what kind of shape was the Bradbury Building in? It was practically condemned! Boarded-up windows, bags of trash and debris out front, broken windows, water pooling throughout. No wonder no one else lived there.

 

[iansales]

True

Ironically - given that the film is set in the future (the book is set in 1992) - it was later renovated and put back into use. I visited it at Christmas. An amazing building.

 

[Connavar]

I think you're thinking of this from the perspective of Ford's character Deckard, which is expected... he lives above the "little people," and at the end, he gets the girl and flies away. For him, life is good.

But clearly the rest of the population, like J.F. Sebastion, was living in squalor and poverty, sucking in the carbon monoxide that leaves the air permanently hazed, knee-deep in garbage and elbow-to-elbow with everyone else... and Sebastion was a programmer, probably one of the better-off of most people!

Nope, not the place for me, I think.

Yeah too many people think sees only the hero's life in BR. I mean he is a bounty hunter thats cool compared to the other normal people in his world.

 

[lin robinson]

One of the screw-ups in Blade Runner is the idea that would ever be easier to manufacture a snake or owl (I mean each scale was built and has a serial number on it????) than to breed them.

The same probably goes for the replicants themselves. A lot of work going into making people that only last a few years. In a place where over-population is a problem?

Or course, if they are SUPERIOR to real people, that's a reason. But not one it would be smart or even probably legal to pursue.