From its opening panorama of Los Angeles in November 2019, plumes of flame billowing from refinery towers in an endless cityscape of skyscrapers and pyramids, Blade Runner changed the way the future was created on film. Of course, it didn’t get everything right. Cars fly, people smoke inside, computer interfaces are 1980s clunky-clicky, and payphones exist. Yet 32 years on from its creation, Blade Runner’s Los Angeles remains a remarkable evocation of a future megalopolis, rooted in that city’s own diverse cultures and hard-boiled past. Director Ridley Scott understood two things futurologists back then often missed: the future wouldn’t be exclusively American, and it would be grimy.
The LA of Blade Runner has Japanese street food, an Egyptian souk and characters speaking fluid combinations of languages from Hungarian to Korean. Strikingly, the culture that jostles up most closely against American noir is Chinese: prescient, considering that in 1982 Deng Xiaoping’s reforms were still in their early stages. China’s rise to global economic power would begin a couple of years after Blade Runner was released, and really kicked in during the 1990s.
Yet the look of this LA incorporates the east-west fusion of Hong Kong – narrow, multilevel streets, crowds hurrying through the rain with illuminated umbrellas. When Deckard (Harrison Ford) visits a cabaret bar, it has all the French-inflected Chinese glamour, cocktails and opium pipes of 1920s Shanghai. Crucially, not everything looks new. The last act takes place in an abandoned, decaying neoclassical building, a remnant of a grand American past; heaps of rubbish outside and rain pouring through the ceilings.
Blade Runner drags the dark, lonely, dirty Los Angeles of Raymond Chandler and film noir into a darker, lonelier and dirtier future. It’s a triumph of production design; imitated constantly, but never surpassed. Any chance to see it on a big screen must not be missed.
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• My favourite city film is ... Wings of Desire
• My favourite city film is ... Roman Holiday
• My favourite city film is ... The Third Man
• My favourite city film is ... Chinatown