Hacker News Reader

Comment by modeless | Hacker News Reader

I had a professor in college who was obsessed with Blade Runner and had us watch it in class. I just didn't get it. I mean I love sci-fi, but Blade Runner was just OK. Maybe in the context of its time it was great, pioneering, all that stuff. But in the context of now, or even back when I was in college (closer to the release of Blade Runner than present day, yikes), it didn't seem that special to me.

I guess now that I have kids I'll soon be on the other side trying to convince them that the old stuff I like is cool and special, and they'll prefer the new stuff.

View on HN

I think if you saw it in the context of movies of its time you would understand the appeal, if not appreciate it. So many things imitate it that the most original parts seem like cliches.

The other thing is that it holds up for most people, so that it is better when you go back to it because you see thing you missed the first time.

This is literally what “Seinfeld is unfunny” trope is about. The original, groundbreaking work gets quoted and used so much that a modern viewer doesn't see anything original in it anymore.

Some things survive this process, though, and some don't. For example, I didn't see Alien until after I saw Blade Runner. I see Alien as more influential and copied than Blade Runner, yet I still think it's great.

To wit: I just watched Close Encounters on a plane. Surprised at how much Spielberg himself quoted from it. It feels like a mashup of ET, Indiana Jones and even Schindlers List.

My ex wife is 16 years younger than me (from 1987). So I made her watch many movies from the 80's and 90's that I think are classics.

Well,most of the time she didn't apreciate them because she watched a lot of TV movies in her teens, and knew most of the plots and twists.

>> now that I have kids I'll soon be on the other side trying to convince them that the old stuff I like is cool and special

Nope. Kids today have access to everything under the sun. The classics still resonate with them. My kid loves Queen and Zepplin. Enjoyed the hell out of "They Live", the Matrix and many other classic movies. Not so much John Carpenters "the Thing" which even I found a bit slow these days.

A lot of this was discovered without my introduction too. Music in particular.

Share the movies without explanation. Classics are universal.

I think it still holds up. Very few films are as bold and original today. Everything is CGI focus group contrived garbage now.

What good recent scifi comes close? Dune? Bladerunner 2049?

Maybe Dune, but, Dune is an unfinished sentence.

> Maybe Dune

I don't think Dune, the 2022 version will make it to the heights Blade Runner is at.

There are some scenes that give you Blade Runner level shivers (e.g. the Sardaukar assembly on Salusa Secundus), but they're few and far between.

And if you meant the original Dune ... nah, it certainly hasn't aged as well as BR.

I mean the 2022 one. The 1984 one has not aged well. I'm quite the fan of the 2000 tv mini-series one though.

Maybe it will rise to the levels of great sci-fi, maybe it will not, I won't judge it till I can see the complete picture. It has the correct aesthetic and the truly shiver-worthy moments are yet to come.

I'd say the exact opposite. The 2022 version - it's nice; I could fault it here or there, but it has a lot of going for it. But... it only goes so far. It doesn't reach the dramatic heights of Lynch's creation, and the mystique of the design.

(Of course one should try and watch one of the longer cuts with more of the dialog and establishing scenes.)

IMO the 2000 mini-series had great acting and actually followed the books (a rarity in today's book to TV conversions) but the low budget really killed it. Many of the desert shots were painful to watch and the sets had a very cheap vibe to them.

The desert shots were shot with a technique called translights.

You're right that they couldn't afford to shoot on-location for the desert scenes so instead they painted desert landscapes and scaled them up then printed them on 40-foot-high by 200-foot-wide transparencies and put bright lights behind them to illuminate the scenes.

They don't look anything like real life but they weren't really trying for realism as much as they were trying for artistry.

I think that when you view things through that lens, what they did craft was beautiful.

I would argue that we have much more original content today than ever before and so it's far more difficult to actually make anything truly groundbreaking. The narrative landscape today is far more complex, diverse, and refined than from even the early 2000s, let alone anything prior.

Bladerunner 2049. :-)

Yes that one. Thanks!

Ex Machina is absolutely up there IMO.

Does it have to look dystopian to count? I enjoyed "Her" and thought it was bold and original, in a different way.

I thought that Her was great. Still sticks with me.

Not gonna say they're in the same league, but I quite enjoyed Possessor, Annihilation and Arrival.

But I agree it's hard to beat "the originals". I've come to the conclusion that it's probably just as much me that has changed.

I will second Annihilation, I think it's incredible.

Black Mirror. For broad definition of sci-fi and broad definition of film.

Sunshine (2007), District 9 (2009), Firefly (TV 2002), Serenity (2005), Battlestar Galactica (TV 2003), Lexx (TV 1997), The Expanse (TV 2015)

Everything Everywhere All At Once

> I guess now that I have kids I'll soon be on the other side trying to convince them that the old stuff I like is cool and special, and they'll prefer the new stuff.

Absolutely, hehe. (I love the old Blade Runner, not at all the new one)

> I had a professor in college who was obsessed with Blade Runner and had us watch it in class.

To balance that out, our religion teacher showed us The Exorcist ( https://www.themoviedb.org/movie/9552-the-exorcist ) - sounds hard but to be fair anybody who did not want to watch it was allowed to leave the room & come back later.

Agreed.

Great movie, but many movies from the past fail to hold up simply due to lower production values... which also feeds into the storytelling element

Don't tell the diehard fans but I prefer the theatrical edition as the story works better in a shorter punchier presentation.

With the hilariously bad harrison ford voice over? my god man.

Yeah, I'm not opening any movie topics on HN based on replies to this one :D

There are pros and cons to the theatrical version, so I think your opinion has merit. The original script had vo, and that fits with the noir movie style they were trying to achieve. Unfortunately Harrison Ford was not into doing vo. But it is a more concise version.

The version with the VO? If so, that literally treats the audience like they're incapable of understanding blatant metaphor.

Contrast the theatrical cut: https://youtu.be/AJzIT6fQ3OU (VO at 4:13) with the director's cut: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=NoAzpa1x7jU

The theatrical version is punchier because it's beating you over the head. For a film that's so heavily into metaphor (I mean, Rutger Hauer's character releases a dove at the end, maybe he just likes birds, we will never know since the VO doesn't explain it) it's quite boring to just be outright told what you're supposed to think. And even if you like your scenes explained in the most anodyne manner possible, it's well known that Harrison Ford was phoning it in for the overall performance but particularly the VO, so it's not even a well-done VO in terms of literal recording.

Hardly a 'diehard fan', I like the aesthetic but it's an incredibly slow film, but I hate that VO with a passion.

Reply on news.ycombinator.com