It suffers from the same misfortune as the LOTR novels, Aliens, Friday the 13th, Godzilla, or countless other works that were among the first major works in their genres.
They were groundbreaking, foundational works that influenced everything came after them. The later works were often amplified takes on what came before; explicit attempts to out-do their ancestors.
(Sometimes this works, and sometimes it doesn't. You don't always improve things just by adding more...)
So, folks go back to the originals and wonder: "what's the fuss about? what was so groundbreaking about the hard-sci-fi-ish space marines and H.R. Giger visuals in Aliens? or the boring, soulless, pondrous killer in Friday the 13th? " The originals seem tame or quaint by comparison to what came after.
Know this: there is a whole world of enjoyment out there waiting for you should you ever decide to appreciate works of art in their appropriate historical contexts. Blade Runner has its faults and its charms and is by no means a perfect movie, but it is arguably the most visually influential movie in history or damn close to it.
Things are never entirely born from nowhere, but Blade Runner's now-cliched "neon cyberpunk dystopian future" look had never been really done before, certainly not on the big screen, and I'm honestly not sure if it's been done better since.
As far as discussing Blade Runner on its own merits, outside of any context... I understand why some think it's boring. It's slow and meditative. Deckard is a cipher. But this is by design. It works for me, mostly.
Of course, if you just want to skip all of that context business and focus on the latest/flashiest works in a particular genre... that's cool too. Literally nothing wrong with that. It's art. You can interact with it however you want. Don't let anybody tell you otherwise.
While I mostly agree, The Lord of the Rings still stands head and shoulders above anything else in the fantasy genre. I recently reread them and I'd forgotten how much better they are than anything else in fantasy.
i personally found LOTR to be "groundbreaking" for it's time. But if LOTR came out after say something like GOT. Well GOT is better in that sense.
The key difference between modern cinema and previous cinema is pacing; and this is a key ingredient stories need to be good, that people often dismiss.
GOT by itself, is a relatively Mundane story. But pacing was masterful. Killing off the main character at the end of the first season was revolutionary.
LOTR also has a relatively generic plot. LOTR is mostly famous for the world building. That was a first and it was revolutionary as well.
I would say however, that when analyzing basic human nature and looking at what we truly like and don't like... pacing is actually far more important then world building.
Blade Runner is great, I liked blade runner for the world building and character development as well. But don't be so snobbish as to ignore pacing. The pacing in blade runner is categorically horrible.
You seem to have a very specific view that pacing = faster.
Pacing is not faster.
GOT is not fast at all. In fact it takes several seasons for GOT to reach a payoff and everyone watched it in ANTICIPATION for that payoff. Literally they sat through the equivalent of 30 blade runners back to back to get to what was imo not that great of a payoff. But what made them do it was the masterful pacing.
>But, as with all things art, I think there's no way to enjoy or feel about it. I feel a lot differently but that doesn't mean I'm right.
No I disagree. There is such a thing as a general perspective held by a statistically significant portion of the population. And that general perspective is often what what should be counted as correct.
For example if someone thinks something as horrible as rape is morally right does it make it right? Or should we go with what the general population thinks.
You can be the guy who holds a different opinion. But I would say something is wrong with you if you can't even begin to empathize with why a general audience thinks the way they do. Don't be snobbish. Your art quote actually has a bit of an odor hinting at this.
No I'm saying there's a majority opinion. And something is up if you can't empathize with the majority opinion.
I mean you can say everyone has their own opinion and they're all right from their perspective but this statement in itself is pointless. It's more meaningful to discuss why the majority opinion is better or why the minority opinion is better.
The thing about snobbery is that you referred to it as "art." Whenever I hear this I think "snob"
I'm actually still laughing about this comment a few days later. Have you considered lending your talents to makers of movies and other entertainment, since you've got a strong understanding of objectively correct pacing?
I don't feel that way at all and wrote nothing of the sort. So instead of paying attention to what I actually wrote, you... imagined something I might have meant.
Okay.
For the record, I use the word art in the broadest and most inclusive possible sense. I would use "art" to describe literally any creative work, including television commercials and crayon artwork from three year-olds.
As for the majority opinion? Yeah, I mean, I get it. I don't think it proves anything, but that's less "screw public opinion" and more "I don't think there's any kind of objectively true judgement about art, whether we're talking about the opinions of so-called 'experts' or the general public."
(It may be worth noting that this entire discussion is within the context of me defending a movie that was mostly critically panned upon initial release...)
From the recent movies, I think "The Matrix" was more influential than "Blade Runner". You can split the history in movies before Matrix and the movies after.
That's a great pick. If we were going to pick a handful of candidates, Matrix definitely would have to be a part of that very short list.
Part of me wants to stump for Blade Runner over The Matrix, if only because Blade Runner had less... prior art, so to speak. It was more of an entirely new aesthetic whereas The Matrix was more evolutionary. The leap was huge, don't get me wrong, but it felt more evolutionary.
Blade Runner's look is something you continue to see today in various sci-fi and games, copied nearly verbatim. It was simultaneously the birth of a new aesthetic and maybe its apex as well. Like, where do you even go with that look? It felt fully realized, right there in 1982.
The Matrix... it wasn't really the look that influenced future works, it was more of the camera work and wild shots. Bullet time, the 360deg freeze circular panning thing, and so on. I guess you do see "bullet time" everywhere now.
There's also something to be said about the relative financial success of the movies. Blade Runner was that influential despite being a box office and critical dud at the time. It's relatively easy (and even expected) for smash hits to wield massive influence. But duds? We have to admit: that's just incredible.
Anyway - awesome pick. Rather than picking one over the other, I would say: they both belong on the Mt. Rushmore of "most visually influential movies."
I watched it again yesterday. I'd forgotten how amazingly real and fully realized that world was. I don't think that movie will ever age. Love your points, agreed on all of them.
eh it's aging. It'll get to the point where it's unwatchable one day. The whole grid zoom thing is the most prominent thing that aged in my opinion. It all happened on a CRT screen which is a definite sign of the times and therefore a sign of aging.
> a CRT screen which is a definite sign of the times and therefore a sign of aging
Nah, there's any number of in-universe explanations. CRTs in our world were still being sold new as of a decade or so ago. Why shouldn't Deckard have an old one still kicking around in 2019?
Or, if you think they would have been phased out earlier given that Blade Runner world tech developed differently than ours, then: Deckard is just attached to old things. (Remember he's also got a real acoustic piano in his high-rise apartment.)
Or, the entire photo enhancing contraption is produced by some legacy police equipment supplier that's still writing their software in Java 1.3 and using CRTs because...internal corporate reasons.
Or (least plausibly but most just-suspend-your-disbelief) that's not really a CRT, it's a far more advanced brand-new tech that just so happens to also have a curved screen and fuzzy pixels because <insert technobabble>.
Yeah. I'm with you. You're gonna "invalidate" pretty much literally any sci-fi movie of the past if your criteria for "has it held up?" includes "do they somehow have modern-day tech?"
I just think of a Blade Runner-ish world as an alternate path our society might've taken. Had a few things been different here and there, we might not have had LCD screens. Or we might've had something vastly better.
Maybe a way to put it is like like blade runner innovates horizontally, becoming and start its own thing while matrix innovated vertixally, evolving the existing genre?
Matrix also came out much later. The kids who watched the Matrix when it came out, most of them don't even know what blade runner was because it came out before a lot them were born.
Also matrix doesn't fully hold up with time. It is a bit unintentionally campy. I was captivated by it when it came out, but when you watch it again in modern times or show it to someone who's too young to have been influenced by it, you'll actually kind of notice the campiness. If you don't, the young person will point it out.
One of Matrix's challenges maybe is that the protagonists were clearly meant to seem cool and relatable - or, at least, Neo is relatable in the beginning, trapped in his cubicle, slaving away while using only a fraction of his mind before finding out that he is so much more. We all sort of wanted to be him.
But "cool" doesn't always age well; Neo's kind of a very specific late-90s kind of cool. One decade's "cool" isn't always "cool" 30 years later.
In Blade Runner, Deckard isn't really cool or relatable. I mean, he looks sort of badass in his trenchcoat, but he's an exhausted middle-aged guy with a claustrophobic apartment in a dangerous and thankless line of work. In a way that's maybe more "timeless."
They were groundbreaking, foundational works that influenced everything came after them. The later works were often amplified takes on what came before; explicit attempts to out-do their ancestors.
(Sometimes this works, and sometimes it doesn't. You don't always improve things just by adding more...)
So, folks go back to the originals and wonder: "what's the fuss about? what was so groundbreaking about the hard-sci-fi-ish space marines and H.R. Giger visuals in Aliens? or the boring, soulless, pondrous killer in Friday the 13th? " The originals seem tame or quaint by comparison to what came after.
Know this: there is a whole world of enjoyment out there waiting for you should you ever decide to appreciate works of art in their appropriate historical contexts. Blade Runner has its faults and its charms and is by no means a perfect movie, but it is arguably the most visually influential movie in history or damn close to it.
Things are never entirely born from nowhere, but Blade Runner's now-cliched "neon cyberpunk dystopian future" look had never been really done before, certainly not on the big screen, and I'm honestly not sure if it's been done better since.
As far as discussing Blade Runner on its own merits, outside of any context... I understand why some think it's boring. It's slow and meditative. Deckard is a cipher. But this is by design. It works for me, mostly.
Of course, if you just want to skip all of that context business and focus on the latest/flashiest works in a particular genre... that's cool too. Literally nothing wrong with that. It's art. You can interact with it however you want. Don't let anybody tell you otherwise.