Parag Kashyap V B.Arch paragkashyap2212@gmail.com
Ridley Scott’s 1982 movie ‘Blade Runner’ was a science-fiction masterpiece in terms of visual storytelling and world-building. The movie was placed in the dystopian Earth in the year 2019 and it was a depiction of what 2019 would look like by neo-futurist Syd Mead under the direction of Ridley Scott. It imagined skyscrapers to be inhumanly tall and polluted air deep seated in the streets of a futuristic Los Angeles that does not see the light of day and realizes the importance of their ecology only now, keeping the remaining living animals as prized pets and over-cloned animals treated as inferiors to the natural creation of God.
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The same is done for Replicants (synthetic humans with paraphysical capabilities to serve a purpose to the natural humans in this post-apocalyptic world) and the movie revolves around the hunt to kill the Replicants that have survived the Great War. Throughout the movie, they are escaping the hitman that is behind their lives and also try to plead to their creator, Eldon Tyrell to extend their lifespan, which is originally a meagre four years. The movie ends with them struggling to live till their last breath with remorse of losing their memories and experiences and whether those accounted for anything in their lives. The central theme of the movie is the discussion of what it means to be human to these clones and the value of emotions and memories, if you aren’t one. This is explored by making the Replicants more emotionally driven in the movies than the humans in their realization of life and their struggle to continue living. Emotions and life is valued in this movie, in a world that feels highly manufactured and artificial. Luxury is used to survive in a clean, lavish lifestyle ignoring the different environmental issues the world faces and resenting the need to rectify them in a meaningful manner and the poor are left in their cluttered streets with garbage everywhere suffering due to hunger, poverty, pollution with the urban landscapes flooded in hoardings and advertisements by huge corporations, in every direction you looked, creating its own identity and unique skyline that was context specific to Blade Runner.
