Everybody, quick! Burn all your trash, take up Chinese, start studying robotics, and invest all your money in hover-car technology, because Blade Runner takes place in 2019, and we're only seven years away.
Ridley Scott's Blade Runner is one of my absolute favorite films. It's a brilliant exploration of basic human inquiry (What is my role in life? How long do I have to live? Does my existence justify my being?), shown through the lives of beings both human and synthetic. It depicts a biomass settled at the bottom a mythical metropolis; a community whose only light is neon, whose existence is as negligible as rain.
I can't think of many fictional cities in film that come to life quite like Blade Runner's future L.A. As the film progresses, we fall into the city's rhythm - pick up on its patterns, its aura. Mobs of people migrate from one bus stop to the next, while blimps fly overhead, advertising off-world colonization. Monolithic superstructures tower over the public, supporting Coke ads that ask us to "Enjoy". We look up, and a smiling geisha pops yet another pill. We may question how we got here, but never have to ask where we are.
