Visions of the Future - Blade Runner

Architecture is a huge part of all forms of media.  Just look at car commercials.  They show the car either driving down Highway 1 in California or in front of famous buildings.  Just the other day I saw one where the car was parked in the plaza of Morphosis's Caltrans building in Los Angeles.  In movies, architecture often plays an even more integral role.  Science fiction movies often show us a vision of our future, whether it be robots or spaceships, they always include a commentary on the environment we will inhabit in the future.  One of my favorite such movies is Bladerunner.

It stars such sci-fi greats as Harrison Ford (possibly my favorite actor) and Edward James Olmos, so you know it will be good.  But, more striking than the great actors, is the vivid world in which it is set.  To help set the scene, here is the text from the opening:

Early in the 21st Century, The Tyrell

Coporation advanced Robot evolution

into the Nexus phase--a being virtually

identical to a human--known as a Replicant.

The Nexus 6 Replicants were superior

in strength and agility, and at least equal

in intelligence, to the genetic engineers

who created them.

Replicants were used Off-world as

slave labor, in the hazardous exploration and

colonization of other planets.

After a bloody mutiny by a Nexus 6

combat team in an Off-world colony,

Replicants were declared illegal

on earth--under penalty of death.

Special Police Squads--Blade Runner

Units--had orders to shoot to kill, upon

detection, any trespassing Replicant.

This was not called execution.

It was called retirement.

I love those last two lines, there is something very erie about them.  Anyways, the movie is set in Los Angeles in November of 2019.  Los Angeles does not look like it does today.  It is dark, polluted and wet.  The city has been built up to an incredible density and the skyline is dominated by the two pyramid like buildings of the Tyrell Corporation.  Its a fascinating portrayal of what our world might turn to as the human population continues to sky rocket.  Certainly, if we continue developing land through sprawl as we have been, there will soon be no open land left.  Once we can no longer spread horizontally, we must go vertically.  What does this vertical expansion mean for a city?

These are stunning visuals of the city of the future (and I love that it is not CGI).  The movie presents a city that is dark and gloomy.  There is a social stratification just in the hierarchy of where people live, yet the rich no longer live in gated communities, but in the sky.  They are probably the only people that get to see the sun.  The entire movie is dark and one can only ponder why, after all it cannot be all set at night.  Instead it seems to be a mixture of the pollution, buildings, and rain that make it so dark.  With buildings as tall and as dense as is in the movie, no sunlight can reach the street.  Instead the poor live in a world flooded by neon and fluorescent light--hardly an environment I would like to live in.  Even Deckard who lives on the 97th floor of his building barely gets any light into his apartment.  This type of scene could certainly be the New York of today if they had never enacted their zoning envelope law that prevent buildings from being so bulky that they block light and air from the street.  Los Angeles in this films makes the watcher ponder what the future of of cities will be like, and especially for me, how to expand our cities and make them more dense without making them unlivable?

I love the style of the buildings in this movie as well.  The buildings look both ancient and futuristic.  The style of the ornament is very geometric and resembles old styles of Greece, Asia, Egypt and Central America.  It is all those styles combined, yet completely new.  It gives the buildings a sense of permanence and age.  On their exteriors, the buildings are laden with neon advertisements for small shops on the street and major corporations in the air.  In the dark it is difficult to make out much of the buildings except for lit windows, warning lights, and what is illuminated by search lights from passing blimps with advertisements to move Off-world, where there is ample space for recreation.  Earth seems spent.  Her open space has turned to endless city (at the end of the movie Deckard is driving through woods, but it is not clear whether he is still on Earth or on a colony), her animals have become extremely rare and instead are manufactured by genetic engineers in the street, and her buildings look old, run down and patched together with new technology.  Giving to the appearance of the decrepit buildings is the movie's use of current architecture.  Much of the movie, including the climax, is set in the now nearly abandoned Bradbury Building and the interior of the police station is LA's Union Station, I believe.  It is not the best scenario for our future and one that can be avoided with some simple planning and preservation.

This movie is definitely one of my favorites.  The setting and music give us any erie sense of what our future might look like.  My only suggestion is watch the director's cut, then you don't have to listen to Deckard's inner thoughts as he narrates--which was not supposed to be a part of the movie originally.  I watched the director's cut the first time I saw the movie and there were some things I did not understand, but that was all right.  Anything you need to know and understand to make sense of the movie is explained in the movie with out the narration.  Besides, its a movie about the future and we cannot be expected to understand everything that happens in the future, like the street language that sounds like gibberish.  The future is unknown and this movie really does feel like the future when some much is unfamiliar, strange and incomprehensible.  Besides then you don't have to hear Harrison Ford say this wonderful little nugget:

"Sushi, that's what my ex-wife calls me.  Cold fish."