The Look of the Future

Ridley Scott is one of the greatest directors when it comes to tackling the genre of science fiction. I mean Alien, Blade Runner, Prometheus, all cinematic classics when asked about top science fiction movies (maybe not Prometheus, but let's pretend for a minute.) The reason Ridley Scott gets so much praise is because he is so damn good at giving a glimpse of what the future will look like. What Ray Bradbury did with words in describing the future, Ridley Scott does with film and set design. Blade Runner has set the president when it comes to how others now perceive the future. No more EPCOT shinny metallic and glass buildings and space suits and everyone holding hands as we build a futuristic utopia. No in Blade Runner Ridley gives you the truth, the future will be dark and polluted, there will be building on top of building on top of building so that nature is obsolete. Nothing is shiny and everything is dirty, and grimy. This is our future.

A lot of people who see Blade Runner say how beautiful the opening shot is of futuristic LA. They cat take their eyes of it, it's like eye crack!!!! Even in the reading author Norman Klein opens with the discussion of Urban Planners talking about how they want to see an LA that resembles Blade Runner in the future. I just don't get the thought process behind this and I have no clue how people who get paid money to plan cities think that this is a good idea, it blows my mind. In Ridley's future LA there are no parks or trees, or even birds because everything is dead because of how polluted the world is  which probably has something to do with those "mesmerizing" towers that spew fire into the sky and God knows what other future chemicals. So there's no nature, the world is so overly cramped with buildings on top of one another that people are packed together like sardines in a tin can, the world is separated into the new mammoth sky scrapers on top with the old LA decaying in the bottom. WHY WOULD ANYONE WANT TO MAKE THERE CITY LOOK LIKE THIS, just ask Detroit if this is a good idea.

Norman Klein sums this feeling up really well in his article by comparing the futuristic LA to his home of South Brooklyn during massive building in New York. "I see a world where no one has time or a place to sit longer than a few minutes, where the streets are endlessly milling. I see the high urban decay of Coney Island in the early fifties...It was unsafe, a place to watch one's back. It was not homey, not what made a community." Is this a world people want? Where there is so much going on and so much over crowding that no one can sit down and enjoy a nice lunch for more than five minutes? I plan on moving to LA after graduation to start my life and I would like to one day call that city my home, but if people still want the city to look like Blade Runner then count me out because that's not a home I want to live in.