Aren’t We All Just Replicants on the Inside?
This article is from the archive of The New York Sun before the launch of its new website in 2022. The Sun has neither altered nor updated such articles but will seek to correct any errors, mis-categorizations or other problems introduced during transfer.
The 1982 science fiction film “Blade Runner” may be among the youngest revivals at this year’s New York Film Festival, screening in a remastered edition dubbed “the final cut” alongside classics by John Ford and Josef von Sternberg. But as an enthused panel discussion suggested this weekend at the Walter Reade Theater, Ridley Scott’s adaptation of Philip K. Dick’s novel about artificial superhumans on the loose in 2019 Los Angeles lives on in more than one sense of the phrase.
“Aren’t we all replicants now?” Giuliana Bruno, a professor of film and visual culture at Harvard University, asked at the panel, titled “The Future Is Now: Blade Runner at 25.” In a world of rapid technological innovation that affects not only how we live but how we think and remember, “We’re all suffering from ‘accelerated decrepitude,'” she said, poised at obsolescence like the film’s expiration-date humanoids.
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