Blade Runner dropped into my thoughts the other day
in the form of Harrison Ford. I was trying to come up with the names of
old Malayalam movies I wanted to watch and couldn’t remember even one.
Then for some reason Harrison
Ford popped up in my mind. Ford is not a
particular favorite of mine. It is a mystery to me how he got himself
into the two biggest movie franchises of all time – Star Wars and Indian
Jones. Definitely it was not his looks or his
animal charm. Some people are just plain lucky.
I might not have watched this Ridley Scott film
earlier just because Ford played the main character. Anyway, without
many choices last Saturday night, I paired a glass of Cabernet with
Blade Runner and some cheese.It was an interesting
combo. The casting of Rutger Hauer as the antagonist took away some of
my hardship of watching a Ford movie. The rest of the cast was perfect,
if you can excuse the 80s hair that seemed to have survived three and
half decades of sculpted perfection.
Of all things a movie enthusiast might notice in a
cult classic movie the first thing that struck me in Blade Runner's
futuristic landscape of 2019 were the neon hoardings of the companies
that no longer exist. Pan Am, Atari, RCA - all
switched off their lights in 20th century. Later I learnt about the Blader Runner curse.
Another observation is the absence of children. I
will have to read Philip K. Dick's "Do Androids Dream of Electric
Sheep", the sci-fi novel which served as the inspiration
to this movie, to see if the introduction of robots nullified
humanity's primary task - to procreate and propagate the species.
Watching this 1982 movie in 2017, two years away
from the AI-rich dark future the movie is depicting, I am glad reality
is considerably slower in pace than science fiction, and hopefully a lot
less sinister. Blade Runner's dark and slick
set design is quite a marvel. I read that the set design inspiration
came from all over - from the Pope's sleeping quarters in Vatican to
Frank Lloyd Wright's Ennis House. In real life 2017 flying cars are
still in conceptual stages but Silicon Valley entrepreneurs
are ramping up on the efforts. After all cars are only slightly bigger
drones and drones are ubiquitous now. 2019 is still two years away to
fatten up those drones.
Blade Runner is a movie to watch if you are
interested in good old fashioned sci-fi. But then again if you were, you
must have already watched it. Blade Runner or rather Philip K Dick's
story had anticipated and provided material for lots
of movies and TV series that came afterward. The most recent ones of
the AI strain I can think are West World (world apart, but a perfect
conceptual match) and
some episodes of Black Mirror.
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