Film Noir Features in Blade Runner and The Matrix

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Film Noir Features in Blade Runner and The Matrix

“The Matrix” has a main science fiction theme but also includes

features of film noir films. It is directed and written by Andy and

Larry Wachowski. Other than Science Fiction and film noir the film can

also be classed as a Hybrid.

Blade Runner” is more of a film noir film than “The Matrix”. Although

it does include action and fighting scenes but these have film noir

features in them. Most ideas about the film are connected with film

noir such as the mystery, the low key lighting and symbolic objects.

It was directed by Ridley Scott and written by Phillip K. Dick,

Hampton Fancher and David Webb Peoples.

The main characters in “The Matrix” are Laurence Fishburne as

Morpheus, Keanu Reeves as Thomas A. Anderson or Neo and Carry-Anne

Moss as Trinity. In Blade Runner the main characters were Harrison

Ford as Rick Deckard, Rutger Hauer as Roy Batty and Sean Young as

Rachael.

Film noir comes from the French term, ‘A Black Film’ or a ‘Dark Film’.

It was noticed in America during the forties and fifties by a French

film critic who saw how quite a lot of films made had dark looks and

themes. These appeared to be mainly in American Crime and Detective

films released during World War 2.

Typical features of film noir include feelings of fatalistic

pessimism, incidents of treachery, and a sense of a corrupt and

violent society threatening the hero and other hero – like characters.

Other features are darkness, secretive and mysterious people and

mystery. A reason for the low lighting in film noir films is that in

Hollywood studios, after the war they could not afford expensive

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being real and being able to tell the difference and also if

technology is a good thing to evolve e.g. artificial intelligence but

the ideas that “The Matrix” has made me consider are things like what

rather than who in the world are real and if the world that we live in

is real or not, could we be made to think that this is the real world.

The film that I enjoyed the most out of the two is “The Matrix”. This

is because it involves more special effects and fighting scenes than

“Blade Runner” also because I feel that “Blade Runners” story line is

not as complex and as challenging to follow as “The Matrix”, “The

Matrix” made me think about reality and what it is, it also made me

think as the film was evolving, when were the characters in the real

world or the matrix and how they were doing the things that they were.

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