ReRELEASE: Blade Runner (dir. Scott)

'If Blade Runner demands to be seen on the big screen today it is as much for its evocation of film’s past as it’s future — it’s achievement is firmly analogue, pre-digital. Here is the vanished world of sets and miniatures, lovingly crafted and photographed through anamorphic lenses which sculpt the space, using all those smog and rain effects, into a series of distinct planes, each with their own depth cues, with none of that over-crammed, slightly flat feeling that the digital paint-box brings: Scott’s city is dense but deep, his sense of space as airy and vaulted as Milton’s. If Blade Runner has a sense of humanity, or any warmth, it is here, I think, in its evocation of the urban sublime. His Los Anegles is to die for. Released just two years after Michael Cimino’s Heavens Gate, and four years after Terence Malick’s Days of Heaven — two titles destined for an afterlife if ever there was one — Blade Runner belongs as firmly with them, as it does The Matrix or Se7en, or any of the dark, rain-drenched dystopias to come. Like the Malick and Cimino films, it tells of an Eden spoiled, paradise lost, just as something very similar was happening to the movies themselves.'  

— from my piece for Intelligent Life