Sunday, July 24, 2011

Cinecult: Blade Runner


Originally run on May 10, 2010 in the Union Weekly.

"I've seen things you people wouldn't believe."

About a year back, BBC film critic, Mark Kermode saying about Moon that “Good science fiction isn’t about technology or special effects, it’s about ideas.” Blade Runner isn’t just good science fiction, it’s great science fiction, and it’s one of the better movies about ideas that I can think of. While many treat Blade Runner as a meditation on life and all that, I see it as a movie about our society and just how screwed up we are. Beyond all of that is a film so wonderful, so iconic, that it is hard to imagine what a world without Blade Runner would look like.

Most of what is memorable about Blade Runner is probably down to the art design. Blade Runner was the third film of Ridley Scott (Alien, Gladiator, Robin Hood), who holds a BA in graphic design, and even then he demonstrates an eye for both designing a world and filming it. Much of the Los Angeles of 2019 was designed by legendary concept artist Syd Mead, who worked on films ranging from Star Trek to Tron. Both of these men’s visions (as well as an army of draftsmen, artists, and journeymen) combine to make a vision of the future that, at the time, was utterly unique.

Read the rest on page seven of the Union Weekly!