If I’d listed this “10 Day Movie Challenge” in order by greatest impact, Blade Runner would have been first, hands down.
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I’m kind of fuzzy on when I first saw Blade Runner. I know it was in a theater, complete with the much maligned voice-over by a reportedly unwilling Harrison Ford. And I’m pretty sure I saw it with my dad, on a visit to the family when they were out in Fort Worth. But beyond that, I remember little—aside, of course, from leaving the theater with a profound sense of wow.
I’m also pretty sure that the first DVD I bought, and the first DVD that I put into our new DVD player attached to our 36″ Sony Trinitron TV, was Blade Runner. And that opening scene—the flames reflected in the eye, the flying car over the vast city toward the corporate ziggurat—was as breathtakingly beautiful as it had been in the theater.
The film stuck with me for all the obvious reasons: incredible directing, stunning visuals, complicated characters, twisted plot, ambiguous ending, resonant ethical questions—and, of course, Rutger Hauer and Daryl Hannah. A perfect mix.
But there was something way beyond that.
I’ve been a fan of science fiction books for as long as I remember. It’s always been—and I understood this even before I really understood what these words really meant—a deeply philosophical genre, putting various positions “on their feet” by using story to test premises, assumptions, reasoning, consequences. Sure, some are preachy, and much of the genre is surprisingly conservative. But even the most egregious are still fun, and, if you’re willing to read against the grain, challenging.
And while there are, of course, brilliant short stories in the genre, I preferred novels, for they had time for the world and the issues to get really convoluted. (Indeed, I usually consumed short stories in novel-length form—collections of Asimov or Bradbury, for example—because they felt longer, like a multi-faceted meditation on a theme.)
Movies generally didn’t live up to that–though, to be fair, I’m not sure what science fiction films I’d actually seen before Blade Runner. Maybe Logan’s Run, though I think I saw that later, or Star Wars (what is now called “Episode IV: A New Hope”—bah!), but that kind of doesn’t count.
But somehow Blade Runner lived up to the complexity and challenge of good science fiction novels. And it sparked my interest in what we now call the posthuman, which I carried as a seedling for years, until it blossomed into one of the main foci of my (unfinished) graduate work.
No other film’s impact has quite the longevity of Blade Runner for me.
This is part of a series, echoing the “10 Day Movie Challenge” that I got sucked into on Facebook:
Every day I must select an image from a film that has impacted me in some way, present it without a single explanation and nominate somebody to take the challenge by starting his/her own post and selecting someone to continue.
Without a single explanation? Nice try.
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