huh .. interesting. So in the original, they chose a date far in the future (2019) and it was Sci-Fi, but the sequel keeping with that timeline, kinda changes it out to alternative-history.
That is a strong attention to detail/continuity. Kudos to the script supervisor.
> but the sequel keeping with that timeline, kinda changes it out to alternative-history
I think this is a huge problem with the cyberpunk aesthetic today. What defined it was the fact how transgressive and original it was when it was first introduced. When I saw 2049 and how close it stuck to the original, it didn't seem futuristic but retro, including one scene with a CCCP advertisement which obviously made sense as a vision for the future in the early 80s but seems counterfactual now.
I think the movie would have benefitted from taking many more liberties with the setting to avoid this retro-futurism.
The first Blade Runner is a view of a dystopic future that raises a number of philosophical themes.
The second Blade Runner is a love letter to the first that also expands on some themes and further adds to the original myth. It’s kids playing in their dad’s sandbox once more.
If you started reworking the original BR environment, it would not work. The whole point is to throw you right back to the original, warts and all. You have to anchor it firmly, so that then you can take some liberties elsewhere (nuked Vegas etc).
>The second Blade Runner is a love letter to the first that also expands on some themes and further adds to the original myth
fully agreed, but I wish it would have been as visionary and as much of a leap as the original movie. We seem to live in the age of love letters with star wars, comic book adaptions, ready player one, and soon a fourth matrix movie.
I would be really glad if we had more filmmakers work on truly new aesthetics instead of just paying homage to works of the 70s, 80s and 90s.
There does seem to be a dearth of new sci-fi aesthetics. I suppose there was a moment in 2013 with Oblivion's iPodpunk style, Elysium featuring Neill Blomkamp once again showcasing his "Global South sci-fi" style and themes, Her doing a heartfelt American version of Black Mirror's near-future consumer tech sci-fi, and Snowpiercer's vivid revolution in an enclosed vehicle.
As an absolute fan of Blade Runner, I disliked BR2049 and I really think it was a mistake to film a sequel of the original. I don't think the original needed a sequel, the open ending and unanswered questions were perfect, and in fact most of the "tied loose ends" of the sequel kind of run contrary to the original for me. They undermine their characters and make it all some sort of silly experiment/conspiracy that simply doesn't do it for me. I dread the thought of Ridley Scott now saying he has more stories to tell... especially if they are of the "quality" of his Alien/Prometheus sequels.
I think I would have enjoyed BR2049 better had it been an entirely new movie and not a sequel to something. And if it didn't have Jared Leto overacting, of course, but I suppose that cannot be helped.
I know this is just a matter of taste/aethetics, but I feel exactly the opposite; I was annoyed that it didn't feel more like the future of the original movie. I felt like all of the screens should have been CRTs, even if there were also holograms present. If we could invent replicants before replacing our CRTs, why not invent holograms too? I loved that they kept the Soviet Union around and put that giant Atari advertisement in.
Kinda OT, but I feel Philip K. Dicks' A Scanner Darkly is a much more realistic depiction of today (even for the year it's set in - 2006), especially the situation surrounding the mass surveillance issue.
I'll highly recommend the movie adaptation of the novel, it's one of the more faithful ones. It seems to get lost among all the big-budget blockbusters that the other adaptations were.
The novel was set in June 1994, the movie came out in 2006. The film's setting has often been described as an America that has "lost the War on Drugs", which is depressingly apt considering the opiate epidemic.
It's weird that everyone points to the opiate epidemic as somehow signifying something major, when it's just the same drug epidemic that has already ravaged the inner cities decades ago. The only difference with the opiate epidemic is the drug dealer is the neighborhood doctor, so the risk barrier has been lowered to fit the middle class more subdued risk palate.
Same weird thing as will the mass shootings. Mass shooting has been going on for a very long time in the inner cities, but it's only a big thing once middle class kids and adults start shooting everyone up.
>Mass shooting has been going on for a very long time in the inner cities, but it's only a big thing once middle class kids and adults start shooting everyone up.
Inner city "mass shootings" are phenomenologically distinct from the more modern mass shootings you blame on middle class kids and adults. The former are born of gang warfare, with specific targets and associated collateral damage, while the latter are much more random and difficult to explain. It's dishonest to group them together as certain groups do, particularly those who cite mass shootings as evidence for the need for gun control. The two problems have different causes and different solutions.
That novel was written at the height of the War on Drugs, and meant to describe that then-present situation. I suppose there's some novelty in how it unintentionally predicted that widespread drug abuse would continue to be a problem even in a high-tech future. And given the twist at the end of A Scanner Darkly, perhaps there's some extra resonance there?
A Scanner Darkly was made by Richard Linklater. He used the same technique in Waking Life. Recently, it's also used in the Undone Amazon Prime series (recommended).
A Scanner Darkly ends with the most gutting personal note by Philip:
"""
This has been a novel about some people who were punished entirely too much for what they did. They wanted to have a good time, but they were like children playing in the street; they could see one after another of them being killed–run over, maimed, destroyed–but they continued to play anyhow. We really all were very happy for a while, sitting around not toiling but just bullshitting and playing, but it was for such a terrible brief time, and then the punishment was beyond belief: even when we could see it, we could not believe it. For example, while I was writing this I learned that the person on whom the character Jerry Fabin is based killed himself. My friend on whom I based the character Ernie Luckman died before I began the novel. For a while I myself was one of these children playing in the street; I was, like the rest of them, trying to play instead of being grown up, and I was punished. I am on the list below, which is a list of those to whom this novel is dedicated, and what became of each.
Drug misuse is not a disease, it is a decision, like the decision to step out in front of a moving car. You would call that not a disease but an error in judgment. When a bunch of people begin to do it, it is a social error, a life-style. In this particular life-style the motto is “Be happy now because tomorrow you are dying,” but the dying begins almost at once, and the happiness is a memory. It is, then, only a speeding up, an intensifying, of the ordinary human existence. It is not different from your life-style, it is only faster. It all takes place in days or weeks or months instead of years. “Take the cash and let the credit go,” as Villon said in 1460. But that is a mistake if the cash is a penny and the credit a whole lifetime.
There is no moral in this novel; it is not bourgeois; it does not say they were wrong to play when they should have toiled; it just tells what the consequences were. In Greek drama they were beginning, as a society, to discover science, which means causal law. Here in this novel there is Nemesis: not fate, because any one of us could have chosen to stop playing in the street, but, as I narrate from the deepest part of my life and heart, a dreadful Nemesis for those who kept on playing. I myself, I am not a character in this novel; I am the novel. So, though, was our entire nation at this time. This novel is about more people than I knew personally. Some we all read about in the newspapers. It was, this sitting around with our buddies and bullshitting while making tape recordings, the bad decision of the decade, the sixties, both in and out of the establishment. And nature cracked down on us. We were forced to stop by things dreadful.
If there was any “sin,” it was that these people wanted to keep on having a good time forever, and were punished for that, but, as I say, I feel that, if so, the punishment was far too great, and I prefer to think of it only in a Greek or morally neutral way, as mere science, as deterministic impartial cause-and-effect. I loved them all. Here is the list, to whom I dedicate my love:
To Gaylene… deceased
To Ray… deceased
To Francy… permanent psychosis
To Kathy… permanent brain damage
To Jim… deceased
To Val… massive permanent brain damage
To Nancy… permanent psychosis
To Joanne… permanent brain damage
To Maren… deceased
To Nick… deceased
To Terry… deceased
To Dennis… deceased
To Phil… permanent pancreatic damage
To Sue… permanent vascular damage
To Jerri… permanent psychosis and vascular damage
. . . and so forth.
In Memoriam. These were comrades whom I had; there are no better. They remain in my mind, and the enemy will never be forgiven. The “enemy” was their mistake in playing. Let them all play again, in some other way, and let them be happy.
It notably mirrors accounts of opiate users: you have a great time at first, and then you have shit time but can't stop. Like in Velvet Underground's: “I have made the big decision―I'm gonna try to nullify my life.”
IIRC even Burroughs wrote that he was mistaken in advocating or defending junk―even though he was saying it doesn't have negative effects on physique, when he was already pretty old.
I was reminded of that when I saw people using a crude contraption inside a helmet to project different faces onto their own in order to evade facial recognition.
Computers may not have changed the look of the world too much, but they have had an extraordinary impact on the experience of being human. If people are now spending 50% of their time on screens, its in some sense equivalent to the world looking 50% different, right?
Not just in looks. Back in the 80s, we were happy when a car lasted beyond 100K miles.
Today, I'd be annoyed if my car needed anything beyond regular scheduled maintenance in that period. They're vastly more dependable, safer, better performing, and more comfortable.
I remember back in the early 80's there was a "What If" of the Superman comic series. In that one off story Superman reveals himself to the world on the Eve of 2020, which coincidentally is when all the cities on the east coast of the US are merged into one, and they rename the entire mega-city "Metropolis". The comic's popularity was discussed in Time magazine. That publication started a pop culture treatment where "the future" starts in 2020, partially because 2000 was too close and all the "cool future stuff" was clearly not gonna happen that soon.
It's something like a long running joke, but I like to celebrate "Future Day" every October 21st. For at least a few "negative years" (-3rd to -1st, IIRC), I invited friends over to my place to celebrate it together, but it's a date that was intentionally picked to a boring, ordinary Wednesday on its Zeroth year in 2015, so celebrating it alone is just usually more convenient.
The celebration itself I will always describe as quite simple, and laid back: I order a pizza from Pizza Hut, some Pepsi (and only those particular brands for reasons of verisimilitude), watch all three parts of Back to the Future (as the one long movie it has always been to me since I was a kid), and contemplate Gibson's Law.
Gibson's Law reminds us that "The future is already here, it is just unevenly distributed."
It's very easy to look at the technologies that past visions dreamed of and be disappointed in some that didn't make it existence in the present. It's tougher and more rewarding to ponder what we do have, how much the technologies in our pockets, on our walls, in our homes, would have startled and astounded friends or ourselves from the past, but that we take for granted simply because they exist, that they are something we use every day, that they've blended into the background.
It's easy to get lost in the spectacle of hover boards and hover converted cars in BTTF Part 2, but there's a surprising amount of technology that did exist in our 2015 that wasn't far from that vision. If you wanted Biometric thumb locks on your doors in 2015, that was rare, but plausible. It's possible there were some kids in 2015 high on Kinect games, and never before introduced to a classic arcade cabinet, to have the way-too-strong opinion that games that need hands are kids toys. They'd be really dumb kids on the losing side of that battle (all their friends with Wiis probably laughed at them), but it was imaginably a briefly valid opinion. BTTF Part 2 faired a lot better in the brand game than Blade Runner or (especially) 2001, and the only heavily featured trilogy brand that didn't survive to 2015 was JVC merged to form today's Kenwood brand, but Kenwood will still sometimes sell JVC brand stuff for nostalgia's sake.
Anyway, long rambling above aside, it is weird that we've crossed into the "future" from when we were kids, but it's an interesting opportunity too, to contemplate where we are and where we are going. To quote one Dr. Emmett Brown, "It means that your future hasn't yet been written, so make it a good one."
I traveled to Hong Kong a few years ago. That city has a certain vibe that evokes the lore of sci fi movies. I always felt I had one foot in the past, one foot in the future during my stay
The 1980s was such a great time for imagining the future. That feels all but lost now. Are there any contemporary visions of the future that are as forward thinking as the cyberpunk universe imagined in the 80s?
It feels like all we're left with is retro-futurism to get our fix.
After the horrific events of World War II, people wanted a positive view of the future; an escape from what we had just gone through. And there was fantastic progress in the world with the dawn of the nuclear age, space age, and computer age. Hence all the retro-futurism media of those following decades.
It's now been a generation since and while the world is filled with tragedy, there has been no apocalyptic scale war in most living persons' memory. People don't need to escape to a fantasy world where the future is bright; we live in a bright future already. So we see more media around dark futures, new wars, and apocalypses; because those are fantasies in the minds of the modern viewers.
That's overall a good thing, though yes we miss out on a lot of that optimistic-futuristic creativity of the past.
Many writers in the 80s would still have been too young to remember WW2 (some might have even been born after it entirely) and there are still plenty of sci-fi stories and scripts being written which are based in the future.
I think the explanation is a simpler one: writers didn't know any better. In the 50s through to 80s exaggerated predictions were made based on observations of the way tech was advancing at that time (much of that kind of tech was new). However after people grew up and realised those predictions were vastly over optimistic they would then go on to set their science fiction stories at a more pragmatic date in the future. Sometimes writers these days don't even specify a date and I suspect that's intentional to avoid jokes about it's "predictions".
Simply put: Writers these days are just more aware of how quickly dates change and how long their content remains in the cultural conciousness.
It's also worth baring in mind that a lot of the time these kinds of stories are "alt universe" type stuff. ie based on some theoretically similar universe to ours as well as x number of years in the future.
> After the horrific events of World War II, people wanted a positive view of the future; an escape from what we had just gone through
A ton of the sci-fi from after WWII has cold-war undertones, nuclear fallout / post-apocalyptic, block politics, space race between US/USSR, etc.
Cyber punk started at the end of the Cold War, when the total nuclear war risk was less present.
And you mentioned that you are developing a game that completely emulate C64 interface and players have to write programs to control the starship through it.
THis is very interesting idea (I'm actually playing an elevator emulator which has the same idea), and I'm wondering if you have a homepage or something?
Thanks in advance! Wish we could see some serious programming games in the future. Whenever I play System Shock or Alien Isolation I think that the hacking part could be more interesting by actually asking the player to do some simple programming...
I actually liked the 2000s-era anime Eden of the East for imagining the world 1-years into the future.
Eden of the East takes place on November 2010, but the air date was November 2009. The "near-term future" allowed for futurism thoughts.
And before you hate on Eden of the East... remember that Kenji Kamiyama (its director) was also the director to Ghost in a Shell: Stand alone complex. Kenji is a veteran of the Sci-Fi anime genre.
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I think "near term future" is cooler anyway. Stargate SG-1, back in the 90s, was contemporary but invoked futurism occassionally.
"Far future" stories of the 70s are either the Jetsons or Star Trek. Star Trek frankly is a fantasy series with a venier of sci-fi (filled with Elves, and Orcs... I mean Vulcan, and Klingon)... while the Jetsons shows how out-of-date the future can be in times of actual progress.
"Near Term future" ages more gracefully: its reminiscent of the era it was built in (ex: Stargate SG-1 still feels 90s), but still has enough "future optimism" to excite audiences during their air date.
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Now that I think of it... the "Futuristic" stories of the 2010s decade was "The Avengers". Heli-carriers, Vibranium, Space-tech, Iron-man suits, Sentient AIs (two of them! Vision and Ultron) and even time-travel. You've got it all.
Plenty of optimistic "futurism". But instead of calling it the future, we're so optimistic these days that we pretend that these things are happening in the now.
Mark Fisher’s Capitalist Realism is “up there” with Neil Postman’s Amusing Ourselves To Death when it comes to why I despair about the trajectory of modern society.
Black Mirror is pretty good, but tends to be more grounded in reality than wild imaginations from the 80s. Whether or not this makes them more accurate is to be seen :)
I think there are plenty of modern interpretations, although it is possible they just don’t exist anymore in mainstream cinema.
The movie market itself has changed greatly from the 70s and 80s. There was no such thing as video streaming and the home video market was in its infancy at best. If you wanted to watch a movie at that time you probably had to go to a theater or maybe wait for a TV airing.
Blade Runner was considered a financial flop when it released, and even its (mostly superior) nostalgia-fueled sequel failed to do much more than break even.
These kinds of thought provoking films don’t appeal to a mainstream audience: to fill a modern theater, you have to provide something to the specific kind of audience that wouldn’t rather just watch a 10 part series at home.
So it’s either a mass-appeal big budget thriller with merchandising potential, or a low budget low risk movie.
Showing “the future” on screen isn’t usually cheap, either. And you can’t do a lot of world building in 2 hours.
Minority Report was fairly 'near future' in the grand scheme of things, but I thought its vision of the future was quite well conceived (everything aside from the pre-cog fantasy aspect of course).
Well, if you like drug taking communists in space, complete with snarky drones, there is always the Culture....
I really hope the Amazon version of Consider Phlebas works out OK, even though its protagonist is fighting against the statistically demonstrated good guys.
You're thinking of space opera, and I agree the Expanse isn't very 'punk, but it does show the impoverished and those on the fringe of society (ice haulers), as well as corporate power (rent-a-cop detectives). It's like a hard sci-fi version of Game of Thrones, with its ensemble cast of viewpoint characters and otherworldly threat. Perhaps it's more like space post-cyberpunk.
to me the cyberpunk elements in expanse look really like props existing as homage to cyber scifi - they don't have an active role in the movie. It centers on the adventures of the protagonists confronting central power, heads of state and planets etc. blade runner was just a retired policeman pursuing the lowest of the low. very different points of view
The belters are the lowlifes and marginalized of the punk-ish scifi, working in hazardous conditions, and used and discarded by the powers of the universe. I think that's where The Expanse does better. The other more "space adventure" plot points are enjoyable, but more run of the mill.
I don't know, but I'd love to see some. Every time I see a movie set on an intact Earth well in to the future it's a bit frustrating they don't even try to address how we fixed climate breakdown.
He saves the world by transmitting data to his daughter who they figures out how to solve the problem, he then meets his old daughter who instructs him to go live with his new woman on a planet together. It doesn't end fatalist.
Burroughs wanted to make a movie out of The Bladerunner by Alan Nourse (what? another one? 1974) and when he realized it wouldn't happen, turned it into a novel instead.
Neither book has anything to do the movie we know. They just liked the title. And both Burroughs and Nourse got paid for it.
It's a nice reminder not to believe the technohype. Most of the world changing-technology that's being hyped today isn't going to happen, and the world-changing technology that does happen isn't going to be what we expected.
I'd say, not to believe in the current trends and ideas to last, in general.
For example, Blade Runner has iconic Japanese cultural domination themes (ads, company names etc) because Japan was overtaking the US economically in the '80s.
Nobody expected decades of Japanese stagnation.
I'd argue science fiction fundamentally isn't about futurology, it's always about today.
"The Space Merchants" still feels relevant because it's about the rise of multinationals, and they're still around. (England Made Me is about the same thing, but isn't science fiction.) "Rebel in Time" is about contemporary racism. "Grass", well, Grass is about a lot of things and it's hard to summarize but "Sideshow" is about our attitudes to religion and "the other".
Equally, for all of the 80s hairdos, Blade Runner is about the classic science fiction question of who gets to be human. And so I'd argue it hasn't really dated at all.
But the date shouldn’t be taken so seriously as “this is what the world will look like in 2019.” For stories made last century, any date after the millennium was “the future” in a symbolic way that let you do pretty much anything you wanted.
"We always overestimate the change that will occur in the next two years and underestimate the change that will occur in the next ten." - Bill Gates, in The Road Ahead, 1996
Submitted title was "Blade Runner was set today,2019/11/20", which broke the site guideline against editorializing. If you want to say what you think is important in an article, please do so in a comment, where your view is on a level playing field with everyone else's. https://hn.algolia.com/?dateRange=all&page=0&prefix=false&qu...
There is still time for a creative person to enact (not re-enact) the "Tears in the rain" scene on a Los Angeles rooftop tomorrow night. Just so the two timelines share a special moment.
There's a lot of bad things in the way society and technology have unfolded since the movie [and even more so, the book] was originally released, but one thing I'm happy about that contrasts with the story's vision is that, although we do have serious environmental and ecological problems, wildlife and especially owls are still plentiful.
If you watched it in the past, it was set in the future. If you watch it tomorrow, it is set in the past. Is today the future you imagined? Is tomorrow the past you remember?
Nah reality is even more cyberpunk. They are machine cigarettes (commonly called brainsticks) produced by the Tetsuto-Osaka Heavy Industries Corporation, one of the biggest and more powerful mega-corps with interests spanning cyborgs, neuronal interfaces, and blazing fast matrix holo-decks. The founder, Rin Tetsuto founded the company over 200 years ago. And while no one has seen him in over 75 years, it is rumored that he still helms the megacorp, if true, making him over 240 years old.
But anyways, and maybe it’s just because I’m a smoker, I love the cigarettes. The mix of high-life and low-life is the definition of cyberpunk: and nothing represents that more than a hazy smoke filled room of salarymen smoking and watching VR porn.
In fact, my interest in cyberpunk made me start smoking (and other stuff) because my 16 year olds self wanted to be like Case and his dope hexogonal dex pills!
Unfortunately my implants got fried by a neuro-virus and never managed to jack in and see the beauty of the matrix. One day... (in the off chance I’m still alive)
I'll take a Joy, I guess. Oh, wait, that was 2049.
What really baked my brain is that I showed Back to the Future to my 9 year old son this week and realized that 2019 is already more than 30 years from 1985 and in the movie, Marty went back in time 30 years to 1955. Damn.
We only know it's today cause of the sequel: https://twitter.com/bkMethod/status/1183784913209905152
The original only stated it was this month: https://gfycat.com/determinedenchantinggreatargus