The movie Blade Runner had a similar setting and atmosphere that Brazil did. Both movies were dark and gloomy in a futuristic setting. I believe that in Blade Runner the director chose to make the setting dark and gloomy to accentuate the feeling of morbidity that was to come from the overuse and abuse of technology. I found it ironic that with the amount of technology that is portrayed in the movie, there are still actual human beings that suffer from things like aging too fast. No matter how “good” technology became, nothing could compare to the actual life of a human. No matter how “perfect” the replicas were made (side note: blonde hair, blue eyes were seen in the movie as depicting the perfect man..should this be seen as the directors portrayal of“perfection” that is the arian race?) they could not hold the same emotional capacity as humans as is shown through the use of Harrison Ford’s void-comp-checking process which was created to check for unemotional responses to help identify replicas.
This movie can be seen as being progressive for it’s time in that it foreshadows how globalization will occur. Throughout the movie we see an exotic mixture of races, ethnicities, and languages being spoken. Because of this over-globalization, or mixture of cultures, our future society will become disassociated from one another and a great social and cultural divide will be inevitable. This is depicted throughout the movie when we see different languages being spoken on the dark and gloomy streets. This can be caused by technology through the subhuman culture it creates as well as the lack of face-to-face encounters with other people in society.
Like the movie Brazil where we see brightly colored advertising throughout the dark streets, we see the same theme in Blade Runner. Throughout the movie we see advertisements such as a billboard stating: “Enjoy Coca Cola.” The blimps shown in the movie also generate the encouragement of consumerism through their persistent calling of corporate slogans. The presence of the billboard and the blimp, to name a few instances, brings to light an important theme of the movie: consumerism.
At the end of the movie I found it ironic that the very thing that Blade Runner was trying to destroy, the replicas, saved his life because of their subhuman quality of incredible strength. When the replica comes face to face with Blade Runner at the end of the movie, this can be seen as the prodigal child coming to see God. His ambiguous mention of “Fucker” can alternatively be seen as “Father” but the director made it hard to distinguish for a reason...to show anger and hatred from the replica. As the very end of the movie I am left with the question...was Harrison Ford a replica too?
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