Bladerunner Reviews

BBC NEWS 9^th JULY 2000

Blade Runner's futuristic urban imagery was hugely influential on later movies but at the time of its release it was a relative box office flop.

However the film noir-style movie proved to be a success when released on video with repeated viewings revealing hidden depths.

When it was first made, poor reception at preview screenings prompted the film's backers to call for a happy ending being added, as well as a voice-over from Ford.

FILMSITE.ORG

The ambitious, enigmatic, visually-complex film is a futuristic film noir detective thriller with all its requisite parts - an alienated hero of questionable morality, a femme fatale, airborne police vehicles called "Spinners", dark sets and locations in a dystopic Los Angeles of 2019, and a downbeat voice-over narration.

The film's theme, the difficult quest for immortality, is supplemented by an ever-present eye motif - there are various VK eye tests, an Eye Works factory, and other symbolic references to eyes as being the window to the soul. Scott's masterpiece also asks the veritable question: what does it mean to be truly human? One of its main posters advertised the tagline: "MAN HAS MADE HIS MATCH - NOW IT'S HIS PROBLEM."

GUARDIAN.CO.UK

Blade Runner: No 3 best sci-fi and fantasy film of all time.

More stylised and visually dense.

Blade Runner, notoriously, was completely misunderstood when it was released. Now, though, there's no denying its classic status.

It is Rutger Hauer's final speech, as the dying replicant leader Roy Batty, that people remember the most. It's an emotional end, adding unexpected heartbreak to a film that may have seemed almost baffling at first viewing.

If trying to synthesize' the past and future is one factor for deciding what is postmodern, then this may be one reason why Ridley Scotts' Blade Runner (USA, 1982) can be considered postmodern, as this feature is central to the film. Blade Runner is set in L.A in 2019, yet there are constant visual features in the film that reminds us not only of the 1980's, the period in which it was made, but also the film-noir genre popular in the 1940's.

‘Blade Runner is set in a dystopian future. The film consequently has a post apocalyptic sense in its setting, the sun doesn't shine on the overcrowded, rubble strewn, neon-lit streets of cold Los Angeles'.

Ridley Scott's 1982 film, Blade Runner, has been characterized as set in a "post-nuclear world that is being reassembled elsewhere in the solar system". It reflects the convergence of various technological, environmental and economic challenges that confront postmodern society as it attempts to make sense of the constraints under which it orates.