Question: Blade Runner is best known for its cyberpunk mise en scene (design aspects of the film): the incredibly dense texture of its shots. Watch very carefully and describe the 2020 culture the movie suggests visually.
Answer: From what I can see so far in the movie the world makes incredible advances in science in the next few years, however, its environment takes a sharp downward turn. In 2020, animals have become virtually extinct. It had become so bad that people were paying less money for robotic animals than they were for real animals. Apart from this, everything was dark and gloomy looking. Buildings were either falling apart or leaking from every crack in the cieling, but even in this state people seemed to somehow be living comfortably (or at least without care of their situation). I believe that the state of the world is due in part to the replicants. Humans believed that by advancing science they would create more order, because they would have something that could do the work for them. In their disillusioned state they appeared to miss the chaos ensuing around them as the state of their environment decayed due to the sheer lack of care and trying.
Question: A moral message of the movie is that it was wrong to enslave the replicants and use them as forced labor since they were so human-like in both appearance and thought process. What would need to be different about replicants in order for us to feel that it was OK to use them for labor?
Answer: We use things just like replicants every day in large factories. The difference? Our machines don't resemble humans. In fact, I'm not quite sure how people from the future believed that creating human-like slaves would be ethically okay. All that they were really creating were excuses so as to not have to do work for themselves. These replicants looked exactly like humans, they had emotions like humans, and they bled like humans. So why is it right to enslave them just because they were manufactured and not born? I don't really have the answer to that, and I'm not sure I'll ever be able to understand it. Personally, I would be against the very idea of their creation.
("FOND D'ECRAN BLADE RUNNER." Online image. Yahoo Creative Commons. 15 March, 2010.)
- Tia Lambert '13
I agree with your ideas on the creation of replicants. I wouldn't want them to look, think, and feel like a regular born person and then use them as something else as if they were a different creature. It's basically just futuristic slavery.
ReplyDeleteI also agree with your ideas on the creation of replicants. It is not fair that they are created exactly like a human being but they are pretty much being used as slaves.
ReplyDeleteI feel the same way as you do about the way that the replicants were created. If they are to look and act as humans do why should they be used as slaves. If they are to be created to feel as though they are human then they should be treated as a human
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