I’ve seen things you people wouldn’t believe. Attack ships on fire off the shoulder of Orion. I watched C-beams glitter in the dark near the Tannhauser gate. All those moments will be lost in time, like… tears in rain… (Blade Runner, 1982) The 1980s science fiction film, Blade Runner, portraying an almost embittered approach to the future of the human race, was an iconic zenith of what our world’s future could be in the minds of those in Hollywood. It is unclear whether we were expected to identify with the nihilistic, grey figures of the duty-bound government assassins, or whether we should see ourselves as more like the childlike artificial life forms (replicants), who burn so very brightly and shine so proudly in the dark, but are still unable to uncover the darkness. Blessed by the first period of peace in almost half a century of near consistent war, the 1950s was a time of great change and upheaval for the Western world. For the lucky ones who survived the two World Wars, the Atomic Age was the first real time in their lives that they could be free of the horrors which had been dispelled from their worn down nations by the power of atomic weaponry. This discovery boosted humanity’s understanding of the atom further than it had ever developed before; its significance was only previously matched by the advent of modern rocketry in 1920s Germany.
With a new frontier of technological enquiry ahead of the human race, people had begun to look beyond the confines of their tiny world into the prospect of alien life and foreign worlds: creatures and locations thought unreachable and unknowable by even the... The rest of this article is available to subscribers of Eyeline
The Running Man, 1987. Film still. Courtesy Home Box Office (HBO).
WALL-E, 2008. Film still. Courtesy Pixar Animation Studios, Walt Disney Pictures.
