Blade Runner

Blade Runner is a 1982 American sci-fi film directed by Ridley Scott. In 2007, the director decided to edit the ending of the original film, and release in DVD Blade Runner: The Final Cut. This is what I was able to watch in the CS Auditorium last February 19. 

The movie started with a paragraph providing the context of the movie. Set in 2019, the advanced world shown in the movie has replicants, rebots used for labor in off-world colonies. These replicants are confined to such work, and if they come back to earth, they will be “retired” by police officers Blade Runners. Deckard, played by Harrison Ford, is one of the Blade Runners in the movie, and is assigned to do one last job of finding the 4 replicants who remained on Earth.  What I would like to do with this reaction paper is investigate how close we are to such technological breakthroughs shown in the film. Considering that the movie was set only 5 years from now, it would be safe to assume that whatever technology seen there must at least have a prototype by now. Let's start with the advertisements shown on the buildings. 

The advertisements shown are like billboards with moving photos.   This type of advertising is not uncommon anymore at this day and age, and thus the movie’s presentation of advertising is accurate.  Also seen in the movie is the equipment used by Harrison Ford to enhance and analyse a photo. As seen in the film, it has a grid on the screen (which is not flat), and it pans from left to right using voice command and using coordinates on the grid. This seems backward for the technology that we already have today. For one, almost all screens now are flat, and the grid won’t be necessary now as touchscreen is very prevalent in today’s gadgets.  

Next, the flying cars. As we may already know, these do not exist yet on Earth. However, the technology to create such already exists, but is not made commercially available due to safety reasons.  

The next biggest technological breakthrough shown in the film is the existence of off-world colonies. This has been a topic of most sci-fi movies but it seems we are still too far out for this kind of reality.  

Finally, we have the existence of the replicants themselves. Again, this is another sci-fi film favorite: the idea of creating a robot with artificial intelligence and human-like characteristics. This is something I’m not sure how close scientists have come to, but some suggest that it is still too complicated to do. To create an artificial mind, one must completely understand the inner workings of a natural one, and it seems that scientists have not been able to accomplish that yet.  

To sum it up, I think Blade Runner has not accurately predicted the future (which is almost the present now). However, who knows, maybe this kind of future is possible, and it’s only a matter of when it would happen.