Blade Runner Film Analysis

Blade Runner directed by Ridley Scott is a science fiction thriller released in 1982. Scott uses many elements of cinema such as mise-en-scene, cinematography and editing to make his movie one of the best science fiction movies of all time. With his movie Blade Runner, Scott captures the idea of an archetypal postmodern view of females as it relates to the society in his fictional world.

Blade Runner is set place in a cyberpunk vision of the future in Los Angeles, California. The year is 2019, humans have developed the technology to create replicants; human clones used to serve in colonies outside of Earth with a fixed lifespan (usually of four years). After a bloody mutiny on a colony outside of Earth, replicants were marked as illegal and

Everything from the lighting, costuming, set design, etc… Mise-en-scene creates the world which an audience is invited into. The mise-en-scene in Blade Runner engulfs us and pulls into the futuristic setting Ridley Scott had created. The first thing we see in the movie, is the world that Scott has created. The movie shows us that everything is overpopulated and dirty; using the smoke, neon lights and low light to create a dark worn-out looking city. One prop piece that every viewer of this movie would notice, is the Japanese advertisement shown on the side of a blimp with a Japanese woman swallowing a pill, while on the loudspeakers a line from a Japanese Noh is playing “Iri hi katamuku”, literally meaning “the setting sun sinks down”. According to the photographic effects supervisor of Blade Runner, the pills the Japanese woman is swallowing are birth control pills. Ridley Scott said “ I want a bunch of phony oriental commercials where geisha girls are doing unhealthy things. Smoking, taking drugs or whatever. To kind of continue with the oppressive feeling throughout the landscape”. Scott shows that the fictional world he has created is overpopulated, therefore there should be an advertisment of birth control pills in order to control the population. Again, there is a sense of misogyny shown, that women are responsible for the