Blade Runner

This was the first time Id seen Blade Runner, and I have to admit I wasnt much of a fan. I did however really like the concept of the Replicants. The fact that they were programmed to be stronger and smarter than the average human was a cool idea, as well as the foresight to program a time limit on their existence. After we talked in class about the possibility of Deckard being a Replicant, I went home and re-watched the film and have decided that he is not one. According to the back of the DVD case, the unicorn vision he has was not in the original movie: It was added into the film before its "digitally remastered" re-release to possibly "suggest Deckard may be a humanoid." It is my feeling that some fans of the original production had that very question of Deckards human status and pressed Ridley Scott or Michael Deeley to clarify his status and they then added that unicorn scene. Regardless, the film was decent but nothing special in my mind. The only note worthy aspect of the movie was the concept of the replicants, though I thought it could have been done better.

Tron

To be honest, this was the first time I'd seen Tron, which is surprising because after watching it I can't imagine not being obsessed with it as a child (it opened only two years before I was born, you'd think somebody would have introduced it to me). Overall, getting past the computer graphics (while I respect that this was the first time graphics like this had been attempted) Tron was a great story. It addressed the issues that are currently being debated, like the point in time when computers will be so intelligent that they become the dominant force and the subsequent human interfacing with the computer to destroy it, it was quite ahead of its time. It was a little hard for me to get past watching the Dude from the Big Lebowski save the computer world and become the Hero of a PG Disney movie. Oh yea, and what REALLY took me out of the movie was seeing a giant Mickey Mouse head on the ground as the butterfly on a beam-of-light ship passed over it, that was really unnecessary and blatant product placement. That was not my cup of tea. Also, having been a huge Southpark fan my entire life, it was hard for me to take the image of the master controller seriously, because that was the same image of Moses in a Southpark episode, an episode where Moses demands paper plate maraca's and macaroni necklaces. On that note however, I recognized a lot of scenes in the film from a lot of my favorite television shows, like the light cycle scene in Family Guy... ok I'm getting off track... Either way, I thought this was a great movie for its time, I even went out and bought it so I could watch the extra features, I'm a movie nerd like that!

Escape Velocity and THX 1138

It came as a suprise to me that the reading, Escape Velocity, was written in 1995 as the beginning of the internet revolution was taking place. Almost all of Mark Dery's notions and idea's are right on with what has emerged from what he calls a "techno-eschatology" What struck me most when trying to compare his writing to the film THX 1138, was the notion of televangelism, though not expressly written in that term. What he writes is actually an idea by John Winthrop which states that "Where Christian teleology, free-market visions of boundless expansion, and an abiding faith in technology have intertwined in a secular theology." While i was barely a teenager when this was written, it seems to me almost prophetic. As with George Lucas's vision, and maybe even Orwell, the idea that technology will eventually be so intertwined with human life, consumption, growth, and prosperity, that we will be so dependent on it that it will become an unhealthy, if not dangerous, fixiation and addiction. Our society in America at this point in time is based on the need to advance technologically while at the same time consume and commodify anything and everything to the point where the original purpose of technological advancement (i.e. medicine, food prodution) has been lost and forgotten. We are truely living in a time where we have lost where we came from, and the only way we are going to remember our current lives in the future will be through the lens of a video camera.