KEY POINTS:
If history is written by the winners, visions of the future generally spring from the imaginations of pessimists.
The best-known examples in English fiction are dystopian nightmares. Aldous Huxley's Brave New World (1932) extrapolates from post World War I America where the convergence of New World optimism, technological progress, and the advent of mass production was creating a culture which the author considered infantile in its insularity and materialistic preoccupations.
Set in 2450 (or After Ford 632) Brave New World portrays a dehumanised, brainwashed society blissed out on sex 'n' drugs.
George Orwell's 1984 (1949) extrapolates from Soviet and Nazi totalitarianism to portray a society subjugated by a regime whose sole focus is maintaining its monopoly on power via the elimination of truth, freedom, and the will to resist. "If you want a picture of the future," says the apparatchik O'Brien, "imagine a boot stamping on a human face - for ever."
Pockets of the developed world already bear a passing resemblance to Huxley's vision. On the other hand, given the near-disappearance of ideological totalitarianism, it's arguable that 1984 was closer to becoming a reality when the book was written than it is today.
Ridley Scott's Blade Runner - the only post-1980 movie that ranks among the 45 best films made, according to 145 critics polled by Sight and Sound magazine in 2002 - is now 25 years old.
In some respects Blade Runner's vision of the Los Angeles of 2019 isn't far removed from yesterday's and tomorrow's headlines. Something has gone terribly wrong with the climate: it's always dark and always raining. The artificial owl that swoops across a grandiose foyer is a further hint of ecological disaster. Globalisation and technology have created a stratified society: corporate monuments tower over urban decay; the dissolute rich re-live the Roaring Twenties while outside gangs of feral youths scavenge in the rubbish-strewn streets.
The glamorous young things smoke like there's no tomorrow but it's unclear whether this signifies decadence or merely the fact that the anti-smoking juggernaut was still in first gear when the film was made.
The film's Los Angeles has a pronounced Asian influence, perhaps reflecting the theory, fashionable in the 1980s, that the US was about to be overtaken by Japan. By 2019, of course, China may have become America's worst nightmare: the driven, disciplined, technologically superior nemesis.
However, two key aspects of the story - robotics and the colonisation of space - remain in the realm of science fiction.
In the movie the latter is well under way. Adverts on giant mobile screens encourage commuters to abandon the ailing planet: "A new life awaits you in the off-world colonies - the chance to begin again in a golden land of opportunity and adventure."
The dirty work of securing new territory is carried out by Replicants - highly evolved robots indistinguishable from human beings. Fearful that the latest version might develop emotions, their designers have built in a fail-safe: four-year lifespans.
Aware that they're on borrowed time, a Replicant combat team returns to earth with the aim of forcing their creator to re-engineer them. Deckert (Harrison Ford), a former member of a police unit known as Blade Runners who hunt down homing Replicants, is coerced into "retiring" them.
Beneath the dazzling sci-fi surface and notwithstanding the neo-noir atmospherics, Blade Runner is both a story of star-crossed lovers and a meditation on memory, identity, and what it means to be human in a world where science plays God.
In the climactic scene the Replicant leader (mesmerisingly played by Dutch actor Rutger Hauer) reveals the stirrings of a human soul as he recalls experiences far richer than the false memories implanted by his designers: "I've seen things you people would not believe: attack ships on fire off the shoulder of Orion; C beams glittering in the dark near the Tannhauser Gate. All these moments will be lost in time, like tears in rain."
Having persuaded themselves that the film was too confusing and its ending too downbeat, studio executives added a plodding pulp fiction voiceover and a final scene that looked as if it had been cut and pasted from a Disney school holiday movie.
These atrocities were excised for the release of the Director's Cut, the DVD of which I recently picked up for $19.99.
If you ever have the chance to see Blade Runner on the big screen, do so - the passing of 25 years hasn't diminished its status as one of the most visually arresting films made.
Even on the small screen it does what all wonderful art located in a time and place different from our own does: it makes us think about the here and now. It makes us think about us.
