Saw Blade Runner right after I read the novel. And it was dissapointing. The book was good, albeit a bit too philosophically depressing. The film had a real 80’s style feel to it – brought back memories of Madonna and her early videos, and her radical colored hair-styles. Yes, the film was made in the 80’s but it was set in the 2000’s wasn’t it ? And while the city was shown all tall buildings and flashy neon signs with air-taxis, the street life was a replica of let’s say old Delhi, except with international pedestrians.

Deckard (played by a very young Harrison Ford) seems to favor chinese food, I’m guessing because he’s eating in what seems to be an open air chinese dhaba. The street is dirty and crowded and there is water everywhere (hard to tell whether it’s raining or the drainage system is awry) . Which brings me to another pet peeve of mine – why is that sci-fi movies portray the future as grey and bleak, no color, dirt and chaos everywhere, overflowing drains, crowded streets ? Take The Matrix as an example – Neo decides to side with the good guys, and moves in with Trinity and the rest, but then he also embraces a drab existence. They might have the cutting edge technical tools, the latest weapons, and the coolest sun-glasses in the world, but they dress in similarly colored grey-green clothes, sleep in grimy looking quarters, and eat what looks like mush.

In “Blade Runner”, the film assumes that much of earth has been detroyed/irradiated by world wars, but does not the urge to make what’s remaining beautiful still exist ? I’m pretty sure now, that color-coordinated clothing, pleasing locales, and clean environments bias me towards the movie. And cutting edge technology helps too.

I watched the Director’s cut of Blade Runner, and yeah I got the back ground beacause of the book. The original version of the film, I believe had Harrison Ford narrating the story – a very good idea, now that I have watched the film. How does the director presume others follow the story without the narration ? All that hokey about the mechanical owl – a viewer does not immediately ascertain that animal life is rare and expensive on earth now, and that humans wish to have pets, and because pets are expensive the poorer folk make-do with mechanical imitations ? There are things that make-up the story which are not told and not easily guessable (they call it fiction for a reason) like what’s a Nexus 6, why are they on the outer worlds, why are the outer worlds colonized in the first place, and why are the Nexus 6 to be retired anyway ?

The film felt vague, unclear, bizarre (in places) with some very surreal episodes – which kind of takes away the impact. The very premise that Nexus 6 are so “human-like” that to distinguish them fom humans is difficult to comprehend in the film in the first place. The 6 Nexus-6 humanoids which land up on earth are shown a little abnormal to begin with, and Priss is way surreal. In the book, Luba Luft was the totally normal Nexus-6 humanoid, indistinguishable in behavior too.