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Remake of Alien

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MadassAlex:
Kind of like ALIEN in that regard.

Alex C:
Oh, dear. Blade Runner.

Well, first off, the city looks amazing. Visually, Blade Runner is one of those vanguard films that executes its design so well that it becomes hard to separate its visual trademarks from both its imitators and its inspirations. It openly cribbed from Metropolis and old noir films, but it did it so damn well that many of its designs have since become de rigeur. These days, if you want to design a dystopic, cyberpunk flavored setting, than you must contend with the visual standards and conventions that were laid down by Akira and Blade Runner. The essence of that design has become a visual shorthand for a whole genre.


That said, if you consider near universal appeal to be a quality required of a truly great movie, than Blade Runner falls a bit short. For one thing, its often hard to really become invested in noir inspired characters due to their ambiguity and I would say Blade Runner gets hit by this hard. The situation and themes are more interesting than any individual character. We only know them in their desperation; it is all too easy to hold the everyone at arm's length and remain detached from what goes on in the film. It's still a good film, I would say even a great one, since that ambiguity and the nature of humanity are central themes of the film, but I do see why people would be disappointed in it, particularly given that these days many people are prone to evangelizing for it. Blame the legendarily awful first release for that one; it's a film that deserved a second look and sometimes fans get a li'l overzealous making sure everyone gives it a fair shake.

Dazed:
Just get the final cut, the movie is about 30x better w/o the voiceover.

a pack of wolves:

--- Quote from: MadassAlex on 05 Aug 2009, 05:43 ---Kind of like ALIEN in that regard.

--- End quote ---

You probably could make a decent case for the hive culture and lack of individualism of the aliens stemming from Western conceptions of Japanese society (and then you have the name of the company, Weyland-Yutani). Not sure I'd run with it myself but there's something there. That's more for Aliens though, I don't really see it with Alien. Not really seeing the paranoia with Alien either, aside from the whole thing with Ash. I wouldn't say paranoia was as central as it is for Blade Runner though.

Alex C:
I think that's reading waaaaaay too much into it. There's quite a leap from saying that a film reflects its age or leverages pre-existing fears to heighten mood to saying that the film's antagonist stems from Western conceptions of the Japanese. Keep in mind that studio films by their very nature are collaborative projects and that what you're seeing is a combination of a wide variety of viewpoints, a situation that results in a surprising amount of off-the-cuff design decisions being made on a daily basis. For example, Weyland-Yutani IS a commentary on how Western powers have had to change and react to new economic realities; the only reason it wasn't Leyland-Toyota is due to the fact that such a thing would take legal wrangling. It also has virtually nothing whatsoever to do with the narrative, since it was just a throw away gag brought in by Ron Cobb, the set designer. One of his favorite things about sci-fi was the way it often took the familiar and altered it, a great technique for showing how the world has changed without having to be heavy handed about it.

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