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.
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.
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.
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 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)…
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Morgan is directed by Luke Scott, the youngest son of Ridley Scott, the British filmmaker who is a producer here and, more importantly, the director of 1982's Blade Runner, the masterpiece that this urgent successor borrows more than a few strands of DNA from.
Ex-Machina is a clear comparison, but the colour of Taylor-Joy’s skin in particular can’t but recall Darryl Hannah as she once appeared in Scott Snr’s Blade Runner.
And his directorial debut, Morgan, does not compare favorably to Blade Runner.
If made by anyone else, Morgan would feel like a weak homage to Blade Runner and Alien.
The movie touches on themes first raised in "Blade Runner," "Terminator," "West World" and even "Apocalypse Now."
The unnamed company in the film may as well be called Weyland-Yutani or the Tyrell Corporation, because many of the themes and ideas of Scott’s Alien and Blade Runner make their way into the subtext so plainly they may as well be called text.
You know a pictures derivative when a list of titles in the same genre technically constitutes a string of spoilers Blade Runner, Independence Day, The Matrix, Moon, Planet of the Apes, Star Wars, WALL-E, 2001.
Like that movie, “Oblivion” incorporates all sorts of themes, ideas and images from science-fiction cinema of the last several decades, including “Blade Runner,” “The Matrix,” “Total Recall,” “2001: A Space Odyssey” and Andrei Tarkovsky’s “Solaris,” among others.
An ear-grabbing score led by M83, the French electronic band helmed by Anthony Gonzalez, teases themes from sci-fi movies past (Star Wars and Blade Runner among them).
I would describe the movie as a mash-up of The Matrix, Blade Runner, and Planet of the Apes, but that makes it sound better than it is.
The orbs have a rapport with Jack that gives you that Blade Runner replicant feeling about him.
And I found myself wondering if co-writer/director Joseph Kosinski had put that voice-over in originally, or if it was the result of prodding by the suits, a la Blade Runner.