The neon signs, continuous rain, ethereal billboards, and the one-dimensionality of it all. Blade Runner is one of the strangest dystopian sci-fi films I’ve seen. The story hides well the humanity of humans and seeks, instead, to find the humanity of robots.
Set in November 2019, the film fashions the future in a hedonistic and dismissive manner. It is cruel with its stranded, empty, and ghoulish rooms. So dense and desolate is the atmosphere where the film takes place that even the sun fails to shine on it. But Ridley Scott’s cinematic imagination doesn’t fail to show you that there is a sun. That the endless night is a metaphor for the ripening of a forgotten and ruinous hierarchy.
The skyscrapers deflect rather than protect. Everything you encounter in this film is desensitized, inhuman, and cold. I read in an article on BFI that Harrison Ford established that his character, Deckard was the only “human” on screen so that the viewer could develop an emotional bond with him. This, against the closeness of the “replicants,” the artificial people who their creator, Tyrell, wanted to manufacture as “more human than human,” feels intoxicating than ever.
But what really reels the film in is the intense background score. It does more for the film than the visuals because the latter alone, with its chaotic and color-dense personality, wouldn’t evoke feelings of terror and dystopia as the music did, by itself. Look forward to this film for its seasoned humaneness. Where the final end is not a test for mortality between human and android. The final end is living and whether one does it humanely or heartlessly.