Slow-Burn Science Fiction and Me

What is your favourite sci-fi classic?

Brainstorming my response to this question, I asked myself whether I had jumped the gun. My favourite is David Lynch’s Dune (1984). The film itself is notoriously strange (that being said, it was directed by David Lynch so I don’t think you can expect anything less) and was panned on release. Almost impossibly, the book is even more unusual but it happens to be one of the few sci-fi books I have actually read.

However, in this case, I will focus on a work that was arguably just as aesthetically ambitious and significant, especially with regards to sci-fi visuals: Ridley Scott’s Blade Runner (1982).

Both Dune and Blade Runner were not films that I instantaneously loved, comparing to my immediate obsession with other dystopic classics such as Children of Men or Twelve Monkeys. This was surprising given the explicit praise plastered all over my father’s copy of Blade Runner. But just like Dune, I found Scott’s sci-fi weird, slow and, at times, disturbing.

Essentially, the two films required patience, further context and re-watching. This suited me since a long-time habit of mine has been to look up every film I watch on Wikipedia and IMDB. Over time, as I learned more about them, both movies became firm favourites.

Nevertheless, I did understand the film’s visual impact. Once I became used to the long-held synth chords, the dark, monolithic skyscrapers, whose entirety you only glimpse in shots from space-cars, and the contrasting neon lights of adverts of companies such as Coca-Cola, commercial extremophiles in this gloomy climate, effectively transport you into the rain-soaked, foggy streets of Scott’s vision of 2019. In fact, the visuals of this ‘Cyber city’ influenced the designs of many a manga novel, anime and other future works of science fiction. Scott even stated that he had envisioned “Hong Kong on a very bad day” when directing his crew on how to depict Rick Deckard’s world.

As opposed to the excitement I experienced watching the fast-moving ships and rapid lightsabre parries in Star Wars, I was confronted with few yet choice moments of pure action and violence between Deckard and the rogue Replicants. This made them all the more effective and shocking. The script too was more cryptic and less expositional than any other film I had watched before. In the Wikipedia description of the plot, it states that there is an exchange between Deckard and another character in which Deckard is implicitly threatened. Needless to say, that went over my head completely. Blade Runner was therefore more of a challenge for a 14-year-old, but I find there is always something to unpick at every re-watch and the same goes for its marvellous sequel, Blade Runner 2049.

Nowadays, I am a great fan of any slow-burn film. This drives my family and friends mad. One of my favourite films is now Arrival in which everything from the soundtrack to the development of the relationship between linguist Louise Banks and the aliens grows slowly and subtly, never rushing a scene or pushing a feeling. I also follow Denis Villeneuve’s work closely too, having enjoyed Sicario as well as Blade Runner’s sequel immensely. A great deal of expectation surrounded this film, representing yet another follow-up of a film that is now deemed a classic, but Villeneuve balanced the need for continuity for both commercial and fan-based reasons as well as the demand for a new narrative direction with great finesse.

Blade Runner was an epic piece of sci-fi and offered copious material to expand upon whether it was in its ambiguity or its many released versions (there were seven…). Lynch’s Dune also faced setbacks and criticisms. But Villeneuve’s treatment of Blade Runner in the sequel, which I now prefer in comparison to the original, gives me hope regarding his turn at depicting the complicated universe of Frank Herbert’s Dune.