Blade Runner, 1982
What can you say about Blade Runner that hasn’t already been said? It’s just such a rich, haunting, atmospheric, meaningful, and multifaceted film, one you can appreciate purely as one of the great visual achievements in cinema history, or for its fascinating exploration of what it means to be human. As far as the art of cinema is concerned, it’s Blade Runner’s visual legacy that looms the largest. Itself heavily influenced by film noirs of the 1940s, complete with its trenchcoat-wearing, hard-drinking detective who talks to us in detached voiceover–at least inthe original theatrical release–Blade Runner’s vision of 21st-century Los Angeles is perhaps the most iconic and inescapably influential fictional city ever put on film.
Every element of the production design, visual and audio, tantalizingly hints at a larger world. Consider, for instance, the dirigible glimpsed early in the film, telling Angelenos that “a new life awaits you in the off-world colonies, the chance to begin again in a golden land of opportunity and adventure.” In so many films, a detail like this would only be featured if it figured directly in the plot, something to be explained and elaborated upon. But here in Blade Runner, it’s just one of many stimuli competing for our attention, earning only a derisive look from Harrison Ford’s Rick Deckard before he turns back to his newspaper.
And yet it’s not just because of its incredibly immersive world that Blade Runner has endured for so long, only growing in prestige and earning millions of new admirers in the decades since its disappointing box office release. We keep coming back to Blade Runner for the spectacle, sure, but also for the alluring story at its center, one that remains fascinating precisely because it offers no easy answers to its central questions about the nature of being human. Instead, we can turn it over and over again in our minds like a dream, pondering how someday, for each and every one of us, all these moments will be lost, like tears in rain. — Carolyn Petit
