Blade Runner | Cyberpunk: Envisioning Possible Futures Through Cinema
Join the Academy Museum of Motion Pictures for a film series featuring cyberpunk films like The Matrix, Ex Machina, Blade Runner and more! These films accompany the museum’s PST ART: Art & Science Collide exhibition Cyberpunk: Envisioning Possible Futures Through Cinema. Cyberpunk, a subgenre of science fiction, first appeared in the early 1980s and uniquely captured the anxieties of that decade. Featuring near-future scenarios set in worlds that resemble our own, cyberpunk stories juxtapose technological advances with social upheaval, ecological crisis, and urban decay.
Ex-cop Rick Deckard (Harrison Ford) hunts down fugitive human-like androids called “replicants” in a dystopian, twenty-first century Los Angeles, one where neon saturates the crowded landscape and traffic woes are quelled by endless skyways for flying vehicles. Based on Philip K. Dick’s 1968 novel Do Androids Dream of Electric Sheep?, the film and its story popularized the now-classic cyberpunk conflict about the boundary between human consciousness and artificial intelligence. Working with an innovative art department, director Ridley Scott embraced a look that merged old and new technology; industrial designer, illustrator, and “visual futurist” Syd Mead developed much of the film’s groundbreaking aesthetic.
