Chiasmus cult cinema trailers - "Blade Runner" (1982). *These will be ongoing posts, courtesy of the A.Glass DVD collection. As I offer via Chiasmus Cult trailers, my summarized overviews*

Loosely based off the 1968 novel "Do Androids dream of Electric sheep" by the late Philip K. Dick (PKD) who passed away four months before the film adaption of "Blade Runner" was released, sharing very much the themes of lifelike 'humans' called "Replicants" being used as slaves by humans on off world colonies, return illegally to Earth to extend their four year lifespans, causing havoc in the meantime.  Where the main character "Rick Deckard", a bounty hunter in the novelization and former Blade Runner (a police officer that hunts and kills outlaw Replicants) in the movie version, is hired to "retire" the replicants.  Directed by Ridley Scott, and only his third movie, and second after the 1979 pychosexual space-horror of "Alien".  Ridley's movie adaption of PKDs novel was able to create a noir stylisation of a Los Angeles dystopia never seen before as a cinematic visualization, which reflected mid to late 1970s anxieties, at the height of the 70s energy crisis and geopolitical turmoil.  As both the book and the movie were created during the First Cold War, with PKD's novel full of subplots of soviet agents, espionage and counter espionage weaved into the science fiction story of what is to be human, and the hunter, eventually becoming the hunted.  

When PKD, before his death, was able to see some pre-production footage of the famous "Blade Runner" intro of a dystopic looking L.A. with its abundance of Flare Stacks lighting up the night sky, he claimed that is what he envisioned from his 1968 novel.  However, the Blade Runner scenery heavily borrowed from the early to mid 1970s French comic Métal Hurlant, of broken down, retrofitted analogue cities, to which the old is new cityscape was not for style, but necessity, due to a cataclysmic event.  Combined with PKDs themes of what is real and what is not, Blade Runner accentuated visually the postmodern science fiction prose like no other movie for its time.  Despite it not being a box office success, its popular culture impact has been studied for years, and its stylizations reworked and redefined from Japanese anime to Hollywood science fiction productions thereafter.   

Going into details about the many issues of pre-production and post production that the film had, be it the conflict between Scott and his protection team on the set, to Scott's friction with Harrison Ford who plays ("Decard"), would take away the romanticism of the movie.  Nor would overly analyzing its projection of a future that has fallen apart, and its retrofitted dystopian charm.  "Blade Runner" will be 43 years old in June of 2025, and our future, more so our present prefabricated and gentrified 'utopia' is more and more looking like that Blade Runner broken down, analogue, unstable weather, drones flying around, Flare Stacks in major cities (awaiting Trump's oil exploration everywhere plans) landscape.  

Even though there are 5 different cuts of the original Blade Runner in the decades that followed, the 1982 release holds up as the best and the most nostalgic, if you were fortunate enough to see the movie when it was released all those years ago.

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(A.Glass 2025)

All CHIAMUS Cult Cinema trailers/commentary to date: chiasmusmagazine.blogspot.com/search/label/Chiasmus%20cult%20cinema