With Blade Runner, this sense of thwarted destiny is projected into a futuristic world where even the clear sense of what it means to be a human being is gone. A sense of self, of identity, of purpose, of love, of life, of being is pursued both by heroes and villains in the sci-fi neo-noir. Schrader echoes Raymond Durgnat's sentiment that "film noir is not a genre" so much as it is a cinematic expression of "tone and mood" (8). However, film noir does tend to typically focus on these forces that are internal and external to the main characters -- whipping in and out of them to such a degree that the ending lines of Touch of Evil reverberate through virtually every well-made film noir and neo-noir: "He was some kind of man." The lesson that noir teaches is exactly that: the more one looks, the more inscrutable and impossible to judge becomes every man's character. Noir is like the stylistic setting of the facts before God and saying, "It's all yours -- we don't know what to make of it." Or, as Doll and Faller put it, "genre functions through a set of codes that are recognized and understood by both the spectator and the filmmakers" (89). Blade Runner is recognized as a neo-noir because it respects those codes -- the centralization of conflict between two opposing forces and the ambiguity that results from an extended and empathetic examination of that conflict.
The conflict that is inherent in the noir genre is considerably spiritual when approached in this manner. In Blade Runner (as in Shelley's Frankenstein), the scientists have worked to extend life, to create life, to mimic it (how noble, how intelligent, how sophisticated and advanced these scientists must be) -- and yet they cannot even save themselves (nor do they really resemble any of the nobility that one might expect from a Creator). In many ways the head of Tyrell resembles Shelley's Frankenstein -- expressing an almost inhuman aversion for anything that actually reflects light, heart, or real life. His focus is on playing God. The result is a wide range of replicants -- some that look human and are kind (Rachael), some that are seductive (Pris and Zhora), some that are brutal (Leon) and some that are complicated by a mixture of intelligence and violence (Roy, the main villain). Yet, true to the genre, the main villain must be a mixture of intelligence and violence to pose as a sufficient threat to the…
Blade Runner: A Marriage of Noir and Sci-Fi Blade Runner is a 1982 film noir/science fiction film set in 2019 that depicts a world that is threatened by human advancements in technology. In the film, robotic humanoids become self-aware and decide that it is within their right to live past their predetermined expiration dates and set out to find a way to live among humans and defy scientists, whom arbitrarily decided
I. Critique While Ridley Scott’s Blade Runner is ranked at No. 6 in AFI’s 10 Top 10 in the genre for Science-Fiction, the film itself has so much in common with noir film (the kind of black-and-white films that typically offered murder mysteries or cops vs. robbers as plot vehicles) that it is often considered to be a neo-noir classic (Doll & Faller, 1986). However, Scott’s film blend noir with sci-fi
Film Noir / Cinema Architecture Perhaps one of the most fruitful ways in which to trace the evolution of Film Noir as a genre is to examine, from the genre's heyday to the present moment, the metamorphoses of one of film noir's most reliable tropes: the femme fatale. The notion of a woman who is fundamentally untrustworthy -- and possibly murderous -- is a constant within the genre, perhaps as a
Science Fiction Films On September 11, 2001, many people reacted to the news reports as if these were advertisements for another Hollywood blockbuster like Independence Day. All of it seemed like a movie, including a scene with the WASP president addressing the nation in a moment of maximum danger. Not since December 7, 1941 had Americans felt so threatened on their own soil, although in general they had been spared the