Quote:
Originally Posted by FilmKoala
You know what, the first time I saw Blade Runner I didn't really care for it. There are a ton of people out there who didn't like it on their first viewing. Just make sure you give it another chance somewhere down the line, you may end up with a better opinion of it. I think it's great now.
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I don't know when you first saw it, but I first saw it in the theater in 1982. And cinema --
especially American cinema -- was not entirely ready for what Scott delivered. We take this sort of filmmaking and this sort of approach to visuals and thematics for granted these days. But in 1982 this was like ... it was probably something like what Godard's
Breathless was like back in 1960: simply something audiences hadn't really experienced before. I think that's the main reason why it was misunderstood back upon its initial release.
A.O. Scott from the N.Y. Times puts it perfectly in his review of 2049 -- though in this quote he's talking about the original:
Quote:
A lot of the movies released in the late 1970s and early ’80s have spawned franchises, merchandising empires and what we are now invited to call “cinematic universes.” “Blade Runner,” Ridley Scott’s initially underrated 1982 adaptation of a novel by Philip K. Dick, accomplished something more unusual. It sent tendrils of influence — pictorial, conceptual and spiritual — into every corner of the culture and inspired a mystery cult.
Like other sacred texts, the film invites doctrinal arguments and esoteric inquiries. One of my fondest memories as a father and a film critic is of an impromptu post-screening seminar with two 11-year-olds about occult meanings and hidden clues in the director’s cut. How do we know (if indeed we do know) that Harrison Ford is a replicant? What is the significance of the origami horse? Are Sean Young’s shoulder pads for real?
Alongside these basic interpretive questions, an academic subfield has blossomed, isolating “Blade Runner” as one of the original symptoms of postmodernism, a terminal and interminable disease of the mind. The film’s blend of curatorial nostalgia and dystopian prophecy captured a mood of self-conscious melancholy in its moment and set a tone of melancholy self-consciousness that has endured ever since. Maybe the real world never quite achieved the smoky neon-noir glow of Mr. Scott’s Los Angeles, but the map of our collective dream world was permanently redrawn.
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Nothing sums up what it was like to experience this film back in 1982 better than that, as far as I'm concerned. The initial
Blade Runner has had such a massive effect on pretty much everything that it's almost hard to even gauge it these days.
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Goosebumps (2015)
You know me too well. 
5/5
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