The Essay: 2019 - The Year Of Blade Runner

Los Angeles, November 2019. Blade Runner's future is now ours, in the month and year in which the film was set.

Ridley Scott's 1982 classic future film of replicants escaping to a retrofitted Earth and meeting their end at the hands of the washed out, titular Blade Runner - Harrison Ford as Rick Deckard - is adapted from Philip K. Dick's equally classic 1968 novel Do Androids Dream Of Electric Sheep.

Both film and book are meditations on what it is to be human, but we have been looking through the eyes of the film ever since it plunged us into its acid rain, neon-coated, West Coast nightmare of flaming night skies, commercial ziggurats, flying cars and fake animals. Now its future is our present. We live in a world of environmental crisis, rapidly developing A.I. and extreme divides between rich and poor. It’s just that neon umbrellas never caught on and flying cars are still a luxury.

Five writers explore what it is to be human or a machine, the sonic reaches of the film, the contradictions of sex robots and the cinematic legacy of Blade Runner.

Fiery the Angels Fell

The legendary writer on film, David Thomson, takes a long hard look back at Ridley Scott's rain soaked mash up of existential noir and artificial souls.

• Producer: Mark Burman

Publicity contact: SRB