Ridley Scott: Blade Runner (1982)

35mm print (color, sound) 117 min. USA

"Whether made in Hollywood or abroad, many fantasy films of the 1980s used violence to fulfill a wish to symbolically vanquish “the others”—alien types who seemed to be corrupting the world on their way to taking it over. The British director Ridley Scott’s Blade Runner (1982) envisioned a future Los Angeles where crime and overcrowding have driven the wealthy elite to offshore colonies, leaving the wretched refuse of Asian and other non-English speaking people to live like animals. Beneath the shadows of proto-fascist skyscrapers (borrowed from Fritz Lang’s Metropolis (1926), William Cameron Menzies’ Things to Come (1936), and the architectural visions of Hugh Ferris) lies a labyrinth of neon- drenched streets teeming with the cacophony of a modern-day Tokyo. Harrison Ford, the reluctant hero, is a Blade Runner, summoned to hunt down and kill a group of genetically engineered artificial humans before they find the key to immortality and render humanity obsolete. The film caused a sensation at a time when the West was demonizing Japanese businessmen as ruthless, greedy automatons bent on world domination." (the Imaginary War, Press Release)