Have You Ever Retired a Human by Mistake?

Just as Cloverfield has not-so-subtly played into post-9/11 terrorism hysteria through the lense of an updated Godzilla flick, films in the early 1980s played into the doomsday scenarios of cold war nightmares by diverting people's fears into the future. I was hit by this tonight while watching the fantastic new Final Cut of 1982's Blade Runner.

Set in 2019, the movie imagines a dreary future for a Los Angeles darkened in rain and soot, where a police state hunts down Replicants, sentient human-like robots that have started turning on their creators. Any trace of palm tree lined boulevards is replaced with billowing towers of fire and endless skyscrapers. It is a bleak future that plays right into fears of technology and urban decay.


Ridley Scott clearly knew he was tapping into unease of a future dystopia.

He wasn't alone. James Cameron soon followed with a small little movie about a woman being chased by an unstoppable human-like Terminator from a bleak post-apocalyptic future. A few years later, Paul Verhoeven took his swing at the creeping technological police state with his unwittingly engineered RoboCop.

All of these movies specifically used the guise of the near future to play on cold war fears coupled with the unkown of emerging mass technologies. The idea of human-like robots suddenly seemed plausible, as opposed to the metal contraptions of the old movie serials.

Audiences are clearly thrilled by what scares them as long as those things don't hit too close to home. The near future is a safe enough distance to comfortably touch universal nerves.

It applies today too. Having mostly shunned movies facing up directly to the wars on terrorism and Iraq, audiences have instead embraced futuristic Transformers causing destructive mayhem, or epic amphibians from the deep rampaging through New York City.


Watching Blade Runner again I was struck by the incredible visual world Ridley Scott created for his sci-fi noir fable, and how improbable that future he imagined is, now that we are only eleven years out. You realize that while the fears of 1982 may have changed, our own current questions about terrorism, and even environmental damage, do still play into Blade Runner's world. Hell, even though robotics isn't close to replicating a human anytime soon, can you really deny that it may come to pass someday?

It was in the context of how I see the world today, that I found myself gorgeously, if a bit perilously, drawn back into a movie that is only getting better with time.


Where homeland security and a globalization meet, that's where Replicants could really exist.