Blade Runner

The 1982 film Blade Runner is considered to be one of the most significant and best science fiction films of its genre. It was directed by Ridley Scott, produced by Michael Deeley and starring Harrison Ford. The theme of the movie is basically man's eternal quest to find infinite life, and how short life really is. It is also about egocentrism which is making cyborgs that look and act like human beings.

In the year of 2019, artificial human robots called Replicants are made for becoming slaves doing work in a colony on another planet. A group of renegade replicants have escaped because they want to find answers of their own mortality; each replicant has a four year life span upon them. Blade Runner (Harrison Ford) is trained to track down the renegade replicants and force them into extermination. In his mission is to destroy the robots, but he questions his own self and comes to realization that replicants have developed real human feelings. His love interest is one of the replicants named Rachael. As I was watching the

film I started to question whether or not Blade Runner is a replicant himself.

The science fiction genre in this film is filled with far out ideas, space aliens, fantasy and themes that human beings create in their imaginations. One of the significant things that this film did was that it became one of the first films to be considered to be a part of the sub-genre of science fiction called "cyberpunk". Runner sets the rules for how movies of the cyberpunk genre should made. It is a mix of high technology and low class of living. Cyberpunk is defined as being fast paced science fiction involving futuristic computer-based societies. The primary themes of cyberpunk films are in the end humans lose control of technology they have invented and they must suffer the consequences.

Many of the codes and conventions of the movie were taken from other film genres, some from the film noir genre, science fiction and action. In many of the scenes in the film I was able to see some aspects of film noir such as light coming in from a window covered with blinds. Another characteristic

is the old school detective played by Ford who showed unfeeling and incapable of emotion. In one particular scene Deckard and Rachael kiss and it matches with the scene from the 1940's film "The Maltese Falcon". All the codes and conventions come together to make the film what is. The difference between Blade Runner and other films is that it is the first of its kind. The reason why is because it is so significant that it establishes many of the codes and conventions for future cyberpunk films such as The Matrix trilogy and The Terminator. Some of the conventions used have changed since the making of Blade Runner because of the progression of technology and the improvements made towards the films to make digital processing.

When the film was released in 1982 it was