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Originally Posted by demonrail666

It wasnt the plot that made BR what it was, it was its overall style. A perfect marriage of syd mead's designs, Doug Trumbull's fx, Vangelis's score. Rutgar Hauer was great but most of the other cast were more functional than great. The story was interesting enough but nothing special. It was the grounbreaking style that the sequel will somehow have to match.

and the cinematography! "neon-noir" (lol).

but you know, famously william gibson went to watch the movie and had to walk out of it because he felt it was too close to what he was working on and didn't want to be influenced.

the thing though, while the style was amazing, there were philosophical issues where i think BR was groundbreaking-- mainly, the question of whether deckard is a replicant or a human.

before that (and afterwards too, e.g., matrix, inception) the "philosophical" question was: "is this real?" (all the way to zhuangzhi and the butterfly)

see: https://philosophynow.org/issues/76/...oody_Butterfly

^^ hilarious title and good succint article. [eta: the first time i clicked that link it gave me the full piece but now it's asking for login/subscription. so read it on first click if you can.]

the thing is, as the article points out nobody takes the butterfly part seriously. it's the nature of dreams/reality that gets questioned. our "humanity" always remains pretty much, you know, central.

but BR puts that upside down! it says-- hey! this is real sure but-- am I really human? maybe i'm a machine tat dreams! bhaaa haaa haaaa haaaaa. and it does it in such a delicate way. it takes it beyond where pkd took it.

in the 80s already we have a notion that maybe we are machines, that the difference between the real and the synthetic is... well, artificial, ha ha ha ha ha. it questions our bodies, not just our minds. cyberpunk fiction ultimately blends machine and human, making humans "uploadable." we're all replicants-- we're code. (but when code dies, pigeons fly and the "soul" escapes!) we're all dr. frankenstein AND frankenstein's monster.

i think we haven't gone past that point yet in our imaginations. decades that followed have actually pulled back from that edge.

so yeah i think philosophically BR was more groundbreaking even than in style. whether this was voluntary or not is of no consequence. what matters is that it happened. it's all in that little origami unicorn and the end that so impressed us-- the unknown reality that blows zhuangzhi's doubt out of the water because it's a more immediate and practical question.

and that i think is going to be impossible to top off in a sequel. epoch-making shifts like that can't be easily achived, much less repeated.

--

eta- and on a related note! how very timely. must be read till the very end.

http://www.washingtonpost.com/news/m...s-in-the-face/