LONDON, England (AP) – A British newspaper survey of top scientists has chosen “Blade Runner” as the world’s best sci-fi film.
Sixty scientists were questioned, including evolutionary biologist Richard Dawkins and Harvard psychologist Steven Pinker, The Guardian newspaper said Wednesday.
In the 1982 film, a retired policeman played by Harrison Ford hunts down renegade human replicates in a dark futuristic vision of Los Angeles.
“It was so far ahead of its time and the whole premise of the story – what is it to be human and who are we, where we come from. It’s the age-old questions,” said Stephen Minger, a stem cell biologist at King’s College, London.
Stanley Kubrick’s “2001: A Space Odyssey” came in a close second, followed by George Lucas’ “Star Wars” and “Star Wars Episode V – The Empire Strikes Back.”
The list also includes “Alien,” the original “Solaris” (1972), “The Terminator,” “Terminator 2: Judgment Day,” “The Day the Earth Stood Still,” “War of the Worlds,” “The Matrix” and “Close Encounters of the Third Kind.”
You’re in a desert, walking along in the sand when all of the sudden you look down and you see a tortoise, Don, it’s crawling toward you. You reach down, you flip the tortoise over on its back, Don.
The tortoise lays on its back, its belly baking in the hot sun beating its legs trying to turn itself over but it can’t, not without your help, but you’re not helping. Why is that Leon? (pause) And you’re a Republican is not an excuse.
They’re just questions, Don. It’s a test, designed to provoke an emotional response. (pause)
Shall we continue? Describe in single words, only the good things that come in to your mind about: your mother.
It’s your birthday. Someone gives you a calfskin wallet.
You’ve got a little boy. He shows you his butterfly collection plus the killing jar.
You’re watching television. Suddenly you realize there’s a wasp crawling on your arm.
You’re reading a magazine. You come across a full-page nude photo of a boy. You show it to your wife. She likes it so much she hangs it on your bedroom wall.
One more question. You’re watching a stage play. A banquet is in progess. The guests are enjoying an appetizer of raw oysters. The entree consists of boiled dog.
I really enjoyed Blade Runner. And one of the big reasosn I enjoyed it was because of the noir in sci fi drag aspect. A lot of people ooh and aah over the director’s cut with no voice over. For me, the voice over MADE the movie. Without it, it just doesn’t have the feel.
Oh, don’t get me wrong- that’s the reason I love it, too (and like you, I like the original witht he voiceover, but I hate the last line). Maybe I’m just a purist, but it’s just really hard for me to look at it as sci-fi.
The rest of the list? Most of them are OK- they aren’t ‘hard’ sci-fi, but they fit. I’d kind of question the Terminator movies (esp. the second).
For me, sci fi is speculative fiction that takes technology and projects it into an evironment, often done by extrapolating into the future, and examining the implications of it. For me Blade Runner makes it as sci fi. I might say it’s sci fi dressed up in a noir style.
That’s a good definition, but again, that’s where Blade Runner falls short. It’s much less of a ‘what it means to be human’ than a standard noir manhunt where the ‘crimes’ of the hunted are in doubt, where you and your surrogate in the move (Decker) aren’t really sure if you’re on the side of right. That’s the whole noir ‘shades of grey’ thing going on right there. They plastered a thin theme of humans/androids on top of it.
Is Angel Heart less of a hard-boiled crime story because it involves Satan himself? Or does that immediatly turn it into a ‘suprenatural thriller’? I’m the type of person that tends to look at a book/film/whatever for what it is, at it’s heart, and not the clothes it wears. For example, I really don’t consider much of Bradbury’s work as science fiction, either- he is almost completely focused on the characters- the science doesn’t really matter, and the situations could be dressed up any number of ways that don’t involve rocket ships or zap guns. That said, the geek in me finds these things much more enjoyable to take when in that form- I like the clothes, but I’m not going to convince myself that since it’s wearing a dress, it’s a woman.
Well, I didn’t find it that shallow, nor did I feel the human/androids theme to be a thin plaster on top of the movie. I found it to be a balance between the noir and sf in the film. I guess we just have different perspectives on the film. Regardless of how its taken, it’s an excellent film.
There is an element that I have always associated with what I think of as sci-fi: allegory. More explicitly, I guess I would call it “classic” sci-fi, because that is what the earliest sci-fi films were dealing with. They examined a problem or condition of humanity through the guise of science. The audience was removed from the storyline because of this plot device (foreign/futuristic technology), but could better examine what the movie was really about.
I would go even further, and say that classic sci-fi uses technology to extrapolate ourselves. It’s ben a long time since I’ve seen Blade Runner, but I think it had some of that going on.
I would would have to call the Terminator and Alien movies action or thriller, though.
