Blade Runner

Just 7 years in the future now and we are far but in the world of Blade Runner. We don't have flying cars, monolith cities with sub cities and lower realms of putridity or even realistic/self aware human like robots. I mean what have we been doing for the last 30 years? Or is our world a lot more like the world of blade runner than we might first think? When I first saw blade runner, I like many others, didn't quite get it. I didn't understand what it meant or how to interpret exactly what was going on. Here was a detective that didn't do much detecting and barley spoke. When I revisited it a few years later, I understood the visual style of the film more clearly. That the message was in the streets and in the nuances of Harrison Ford.

Blade runner was now the story of a “derelict city, choked with pollution and populated by the dregs of humanity” (Wright, 1983). A dystopia of neon, smoke and rain. Sounds a lot like east London, Tokyo or New York. Blade runner wasn't the fantastical story of a glistening future like I was used to from sci-fi, it showed me the gritty truth of what cities now were like. Granted it was exaggerated for visual effect, so we don't have spinners (flying cars) to whisk us off to the Tyrell corporation for a brand new replicant snake but, it was a remarkably accurate portrayal of the near future.
Ridley seems to carry on a theme from his film Alien (Scott, 1979). The character Ash is an android under the control of “the company”. He's directed to take the alien back to the company for further testing with the crew set as expendable.