An essay of sorts on Blade Runner: Director’s Cut - A

1982 Original/1992 Director’s Cut On DVD, 117 minutes, Rated R. Trailer.

The value of science fiction works, like prophecy, is best determined later as their prognostications are fulfilled or discounted. So it is that Ridley Scott’s sci-fi masterpiece Blade Runner becomes more important each year. While paying homage to the iconic dystopic imagery of Metropolis, the highly-stylized LA of Blade Runner has become iconic in its own right, with Minority Report, A.I., Fifth Element, Dark City, and the Batman series drawing obviously from it. Click the link below for the rest of the post.
Indeed, during its initial release, while the film was greeted with quite mixed reviews, it was the visual world Scott created that was universally hailed. And it is this dark, neo-noir world of shadows that initially arrests the viewer. From the bizarre industrial Ziggurat that dominates early scenes to the neon-dominated Chinatown to apartments and business offices that feel like a ‘40’s noir film’s take on 2019, it is a city of nightmares bathed in darkness.

Behind the visuals is a story as bleak and dark as the landscape. Harrison Ford plays blade runner Deckard, a man trained to hunt down and kill cyborgs called Replicants that have become so human-like that it takes a specialist to tell them apart. “More human than human” is the ad-line of their makers, which perfectly sums up the ethical debate at the heart of this film. What does humanity do with its machines when the machine it creates are virtually identical to humans? Part of the genius of Blade Runner is that it captures the exact moment when artificial intelligence and humanity are running neck-and-neck. The Matrix, The Terminator, and AI all explore the eventual result of humanity’s insistence on creating their replacement, but it is Blade Runner that catches the world in the year of this transition.

Going back to the Greek story of Icharus then to Frankenstein, science fiction has consistently offered a counter-narrative to the prevailing humanist notion that human-powered science can eventually “fix us”. These stories, of which Blade Runner stands in direct succession, warn us that when humans play God, they only mess things up. Of course, these are all retellings of Genesis 2-3 in which Adam and Eve destroy their Eden trying to be like God. This theology is not lost on Scott, who alludes to early Genesis repeatedly, from the red pill (apple) eaten in the background on jumbo-trons (an image reconstituted by The Matrix), to the previously mentioned Ziggurat which functions heavily in the Tower of Babel story of Genesis 11, itself just a retelling of the story of the Fall.

But, pushing past all these stories, Blade Runner asks, “What is our responsibility to our creations when they become “more human than human”. And it asks what, exactly, we mean by soul, and, if there be a God, wouldn’t that God extend an afterlife to our sentient creations even if we cannot? If there is hope in Blade Runner, it is that Replicants might have more mercy than we do. The prevailing wisdom is that a computer that can mimic human brain activity completely is no more than fifteen years away, placing Blade Runner’s date of 2019 eerily close to accurate. What this means, of course, is that we have to pray replicant’s are more merciful than us since the year after we can create a computer that matches the human mind, we’ll be able to make one four times as intelligent as the human mind. The implications for every year after that quickly become staggering.

The ethical debate making headlines right now involves embryos and stem cells (although it appears that some recent developments involving skin cells may make that argument moot). The ethical debate in ten years, which will still center on the questions “How do we define a “person?” will be in regards to artificial intelligence. For people interested in this issue, of which we all will certainly have a vested interest, Blade Runner serves as the definitive primer.