Blade Runner Analysis

Blade Runner (1982)

Directed by: Ridley Scott
Streaming on Netflix.

The film is set in dystopian 2019, it feels interesting to watch this film now - we can directly see how much of the director's view of today turned out to be true. Of course, it's not fair to expect filmmakers to have an exact vision of how the world would turn out to be, this is there even in 2001: A Space Odyssey and yet, they got a few things right like how the world has big screens of advertisements - although Ridley Scott was being nice to us, he had only one big screen of advertisements in an area. One good thing about this film is that the worldbuilding never comes in way of the plot here, there is conflict right from the first scene and the film keeps moving forward, and worldbuilding happens parallely in the background through the visuals.

In this film, 'Human vs Robot' isn't a conflict of the film - it's part of the setting of the film because here we don't see the evolution of this conflict like in Shankar's Robo. The film starts off with the conflict that a few replicants (synthetic humans) have escaped and a blade runner (human) has to go and retire (kill) the replicants. Deckard falling in love with a replicant also reminded me of the sequence in Robo - I've watched only the final cut version - apparently Deckard being a human or a replicant is left ambiguous in the other cuts and only in the final cut does it clearly lead to it. 

We must discuss about the design of the film, Edward Hopper's painting - Nighthawks is an inspiration for the look of the film. We see a lot of blue, throughout images, in all shadows, highlights and midtones - we also see a lot of smoke, bokeh effects with a lot of lights in the backgrounds, and neon lights. The image suddenly changes from dark, to bright and vice versa in some places when there's a conversation happening - probably depicting the contrast between the characters. The tone of the film is close to the film noir, whether it's the graphic violence, or the dark themes, the femme fatale and a twist ending.