Blade Runner (1982)
Directed by Ridley Scott
In the smog-choked dystopian Los Angeles of 2019, blade runner Rick Deckard is called out of retirement to terminate a quartet of replicants who have escaped to Earth seeking their creator for a way to extend their short life spans.
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What critics compared Blade Runner to
It’s a place to have fun in a Blade Runner-lite playground with a lead actor who’s more than capable of delivering Wright’s smartass dialogue in a way that endears himself to the audience.
…could have birthed a formulaic Blade Runner rip-off…
Chung-hoon Chung’s cinematography feels futuristic yet still down-to-earth, without relying too heavily on the bright neon lights and high-contrast visuals one often associates with Blade Runner.
It’s the basic logline for hundreds of sci-fi dystopias, from Blade Runner to Wall-E.
Go beyond this year, and it is impossible not to think of The Hunger Games, Robocop, Brazil, Blade Runner, and Minority Report…
This isn’t Blade Runner’s neon gloom…
It all feels too familiar by a half, from a premise which reminds at key junctures of Alex Proyas' superior 2004 thriller " I, Robot ," to a tone that recalls Steven Spielberg's 2002 pic " Minority Report ," to set design and art direction clearly inspired by?but far less vivid than?"Blade Runner."
The setting appears to be another neo-Tokyo, recalling that other anime classic “Akira” (1988), with almost everything about the visuals lifted from Ridley Scott’s 1982 landmark “Blade Runner,” including giant animated advertisements on the sides of high-rises.
Once again, echoes of other comparable fare — Blade Runner , which pre-dates the manga; The Matrix , which is widely regarded to have taken inspiration from it — remain evident, without overshadowing the end product thanks to the imagery’s all-round dazzling display.
But Masamune borrowed a lot from Blade Runner, and that movie seems to be the primary visual inspiration for this adaptation.
The film slavishly revisits not only the original inspiration but such other sci-fi landmarks as Blade Runner and Metropolis, creating an unsettling feeling not unlike the “uncanny valley” effect more common to photorealistic animation.
The story doesn’t have a traditional structure, there are multiple protagonists, and then you have just a lot of weird techno-future stuff where there’s the Blade Runner-esque grimy neon, but also stuff like robot strippers (that don’t look human, but would fit well inside the world of Futurama), creepy designs, and basically a “keep out” sign for the future.
To be honest, Leo’s Amish identity is a far more interesting characteristic than his voicelessness, especially in a movie that appears to have lifted its gorgeous, neon-lit future-noir aesthetic from “Blade Runner.”
From a familiar set of references, the movie forges an unexpected narrative stew — namely, the story of a voiceless Amish man in a “Blade Runner”-inspired Berlin (which, of course, carries plenty of Bowie resonance on its own).
So that’s the lay of the land, and how wildly undulating it is, the action cutting between Skarsgård running around futuristic Berlin – which looks like if Warner Bros licensed a Blade Runner theme park – with a weaponised table leg he’s whittled, and Rudd and Theroux, whose character names are Cactus and Duck by the way, tenpin bowling and shooting the shit and perving on girls like they’re in deleted scenes from Dazed and Confused.
The film's setting is Berlin 40 years in the future, and over that time it's become the same neon-hued, graffiti-pocked, advertisement-ravaged dystopia that's figured in countless films that have followed in the footsteps of Ridley Scott's Blade Runner and Steven Spielberg's Minority Report .
The Holy Grail in this regard is Ridley Scott’s Blade Runner (and more recently, Denis Villeneuve’s belated follow-up, Blade Runner 2049) — the 80s classic immerses viewers into smartly-conceived environments that feel lived-in and tangible, foreign but familiar, and that in turn works to enhance the narrative.
Though Jones doesn't mention Bowie's work as an influence, he credits films like Kubrick's 1968 "2001: A Space Odyssey" -- "Blade Runner" and "Outland" are others -- as touchstones as he was working on the story upon which Nathan Parker would base the screenplay.
Director Duncan Jones also taps into the visual style of "Silent Running," which was directed by special effects wizard Douglas Trumbull (who worked on "2001" as well as "Blade Runner").
Zowie Bowie, David's son), is a welcome throwback to philosophically interesting science fiction films such as 2001: A Space Odyssey and Blade Runner.
"Moon" borrows liberally from "Alien," "2001" and "Blade Runner" to forge an actor's showcase for Sam Rockwell.
Though it poses questions of the existential sort (see also: Kubrick’s movie as well as Blade Runner and both Solarises), it does so in ways that are remarkably moving and concrete.
There is also a connection to Blade Runner (though not in terms of mood, structure or look).
Chief among them was Mute, a Blade Runner-inspired drama heâ??d written set in a futuristic Berlin.
Another car chase, surely, or another grisly scene of medical malfeasance, whether in the form of implanting tiny crawling robotic critters under someone's eyelid or some unsavory business involving a bone saw, or yet one more reference to (or rip-off from) "Blade Runner" or "Logan's Run" or "Gattaca" or "Minority Report" or "The Island of Dr. Moreau" or "Austin Powers" (unintentional, but there are scenes featuring McGregor's character and his nemesis, played by Sean Bean, that can't help but conjure Dr. Evil).
But writer Caspian Tredwell-Owen - who adapted his own story with co-screenwriters Alex Kurtzman and Roberto Orci - was also inspired by Philip K. Dick's "Blade Runner," which proposed the notion of having manufactured humans fight for their identities after being implanted with previously existing memories.
The resultant motion picture is sort of a combination "THX-1138," "Logan's Run," "Blade Runner," and "The Matrix."
Their hesitation to kiss, you see, comes from the fact they're playing harvested beings, or replicants -- to borrow a term from "Blade Runner," which Michael Bay's movie has ransacked like WorldCom's Bernard Ebbers.
Possessing no new ideas, it reworks and borrows from such films as Blade Runner, The Matrix and Logan's Run.
Obviously people will make comparisons to Blade Runner and Logan's Run , and some from writer Philip K. Dick.
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One may also question the assertions by McWeeny and Farici that elements from later sci-fi films, including Star Wars, Blade Runner, The Terminator and RoboCop, were somehow directly inspired by Jodorowsky's unmade movie.
From Star Wars to Alien to Blade Runner, without Jodorowsky who knows what science-fiction would look like today.
That means no “Blade Runner,” possibly no publication for William Gibson, no “Matrix,” et cetera.
I know the best version of Blade Runner is somewhere between the four different cuts of that movie, so I am thankful to Pavich for putting together a thoroughly entertaining and inspiring doc that gives me the ability now to imagine what Jodorowsky’s Dune could have been.
You can see its mark on Star Wars, Alien, Blade Runner and every movie that they in turn inspired.
Pavich interviews anyone and everyone in the core pre-production process who will talk about the project – Mick Jagger is suitably absent – and Pavich makes a cogent argument that any number of now-famous Hollywood films (Ridley Scott’s Alien and Blade Runner, along with Star Wars for starters) arrived in theatres with recognizable, obvious strains of Jodorowsky’s Dune in their DNA.
The film's design evokes peak-period Jean Giraud, whose gorgeous science-fiction illustrations inspired Ridley Scott's films Alien and Blade Runner, and therefore every subsequent depiction of a future built up from the accretion of successive decades of engineering.
Not since The Matrix, or perhaps even Blade Runner (which Automata also liberally references), has a dystopian world seemed so compelling in-and-of itself.
Inside one of the small number of cities on Earth that are protected from the deadly rays of the sun, but not from a production design that’s a blatant rip-off of “Blade Runner," lives bitter insurance agent Jacq Vaucan (Antonio Banderas), who’s in charge of making sure Pilgrims operate the way they’re supposed to.
At its worst, it is derivative of tropes mined more creatively in its stylistic forebears Blade Runner and Brazil, but without the innovation of the former or the satire of the latter.
Spanish helmer Gabe Ibanez (“Hierro”) and co-writers Igor Legaretta Gomez and Javier Sanchez Donate pick from “Blade Runner,” “Terminator” and countless other pics in what feels like a late-night brainstorm at a sci-fi geek convention, yet did the producers — none of them novices — not think to ask: “Does this work?”
Directed and co-written by Gabe Ibáñez with an overwrought tone, the dreary "Blade Runner"-"I, Robot" retread never manages to evolve into a compelling piece of filmmaking despite production design that has its moments of stark, surreal beauty.
There are nods to science-fiction films like “Blade Runner” in the futuristic society, but the fact that it is only 30 years in the future makes for a more relatable urban landscape.
With both its urban and rural-cornfield milieus marked by consuming bleakness, Looper harkens back to both Blade Runner and The Killers while nonetheless crafting its own unique spin on noir fatalism.
Tropes from Blade Runner, Twelve Monkeys, and the odd French New Wave thriller are mixed and matched to give the illusion you’re watching an ?existential?
There hasn’t been a movie quite like it, even though it has scenes and themes that we’ve seen before in movies like “The Terminator,” “Blade Runner” and some of the “X-Men” films.
Like Philip K. Dick - who wrote the story that became "Blade Runner," aspects of which "Looper" resembles - Johnson uses genre to develop unconventional ideas and alternative possibilities.
It’s a future as textured, richly detailed and despairing as the one depicted in “Blade Runner,” although at least in Ridley Scott’s movie, the Japanese owned the United States.
Scenes in Snoke’s throne room with blood red walls, warriors in similarly colored uniforms and his gold brocade robe (designed by Michael Kaplan, Blade Runner) are indelible.
Human-looking robots are a staple of sci-fi, like the original Westworld, Blade Runner, or The Terminator.
It might seem like Companion ambitiously overextends itself by balancing the complexity of interpersonal relationships and philosophical treatises from Ridley Scott’s Blade Runner (1982).
There are also some “Blade Runner” (1982) references since the robots have different levels of sentience depending on their person’s setting preference.
Freely drawing from inspirations like The Stepford Wives, A.I.: Artificial Intelligence, Blade Runner, and Ex Machina, the film is more interested in the questions raised by Iris’ existence than turning her into a killing machine.
While not on the level with “Blade Runner” (1982) or its sequel, “Companion” manages some visual and thematic references to “Hardware” (1990) and “A.I. Artificial Intelligence” (2001).
…allusions to philosophical sci-fi treatises running the gamut from Blade Runner to Ex Machina…
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This is because, like other movies in this dystopian vein (including ''Blade Runner'' and ''A.I.''), it proposes that machines have feelings, too.
Picky sci-fi fans will complain that the film is glaringly derivative of "Blade Runner" and borrows a key story element of "2001: A Space Odyssey."
Or, perhaps more accurately, call it a hash of Philip K. Dick movies, a freshly microwaved mix of Blade Runner and Minority Report topped with a big dollop of cheese.
"I, Robot" doesn't do for the eponymous book what "Blade Runner" did for Philip K. Dick's "Do Androids Dream of Electric Sheep?"
The notion achieved perhaps its purest form in Alex Proyas' Dark City, a film which -- like Blade Runner -- took some time to find its audience.
Like "Blade Runner,'' it imagines a city of the future.
Before the film is half over he manages to evoke memories of "Blade Runner," the Gotham of Tim Burton's "Batman," Fritz Lang's "Metropolis," and assorted images from David Cronenberg and Terry Gilliam.
Proyas must have seen every film noir ever made at least twice, from "M" to "L.A. Confidential," with stops in between for everything from "The Big Heat" to "Blade Runner," and it shows.
Proyas' overwrought MTV camera jitters tend to highlight characterisation that's two dimensional even by comic book standards, and the film can't stand the inevitable comparisons with Blade Runner or Brazil.
Line up the other recent candidates, which include Tim Burton's Batman, Ridley Scott's Blade Runner , Jean-Pierre Jeunet and Marc Caro's Delicatessan and The City of Lost Children , and Terry Gilliam's Brazil , and Dark City equals or bests them all.
Caleb, meantime, is being visited by said mysterious strangers from beyond—who apparently monitor our media and enjoyed Rutger Hauer in Blade Runner, Spike in “Buffy the Vampire Slayer” and Sting in Dune, since they all do the white-spiky-hair, glowering, trench-coat thing.
The director, Alex Proyas , and his technical team have created a world that will remind you of the forlorn urban wasteland in " Blade Runner " and of the Gothic extravagances in " Batman ," yet this world is grungier and more forbidding than either.
It's almost unremittingly grungy and overwrought--"Blade Runner" with a hangover--with an eardrum-blasting industrial rock score to go with its eyeball-popping industrial rock look.
With a view of Detroit that is every bit as bleak and dazzling as the urban panoramas presented in Batman and Blade Runner, this film makes it clear from the outset that wherever its flaws may lie, they will not be in the realm of visual presentation.
Were it not for Brandon Lee's death on the set of The Crow?he was killed by a gun that was supposed to be firing blanks-the movie itself would be little more than your basic heavy-metal occult revenge thriller, complete with rain-swept futuristic dreamscapes right out of Blade Runner and Batman.
…the Blade Runner-esque neon landscape of Shakari…
Intrigue remains high as our heroes head to the visually appealing, Blade Runner-esque planet Shakari…
…one scene benefits from a unique techno-punk aesthetic reminiscent of Blade Runner…
…where there are heavy nods to Blade Runner via endless rain and retro-futurist design…
After meeting with the aunt and uncle of Ratta on Nal Hutta, Mando and Grogu head to the Moon of Shakira, which looks an awful lot like "Blade Runner's" L.A.
…other modern classics (“Top Gun” to “Blade Runner,” even a little “Streets of Fire” for the real ones out there)…