Rewind

The movie clip above is "Blade Runner, the Architectural Cut" by Herve Attia. Excerpts from the noir film (1982) are intercut with shots of the locations taken in 2009. The well-known Los Angeles locales include FLLW's Ennis House, the Bradbury Building, the Million Dollar Theater, Union Station and the Second Street tunnel. So of course this film is an old favorite, and an excuse to post this. These disparate locations are fused together in a single dystopian urban megalopolis, inspired by Hong Kong, rendering a bleak future set in 2019 where bionic life is created to be expendable. The Wiki movie summary explores the complexities of adapting Phillip K. Dick's book "Do Androids Dream of Electric Sheep?" and the thematic layers that play out in the film.

The depiction of a constant, nasty rain as climate change, along with the superimposition of refinery flares and oil production rigs in the urban scape beside the massive city pyramids is a futuristic projection from the late '70's vision of a debased and polluted earth. The overweening corporate control of all life and resources is embedded as an added element in the original novel by Philip K. Dick, which wrestled with the philosophical issues of artificially created life. It's a dark vision that doesn't need to become reality; the changing urban strategies that embrace natural processes and conserve energy are becoming, thankfully, the direction of the future.