Visions of the Future: Blade Runner (Dir Ridley Scott, 1h 57m, 1982)
There are a handful of films that have changed the shape of cinema and popular culture. Blade Runner is one of them. A minor success on its release, the film's power growing with its audience and a series of edited releases of the film reestablish the director, Ridley Scott's original vision, this culminating with 2007's Blade Runner: The Final Cut . Adapting Philip K Dick's dystopian science fiction novel, Do Androids Dream of Electric Sheep (1968), Blade Runner can be found everywhere; foremost is the literary genre that took Blade Runner's themes in myriad directions, beginning with William Gibson's Neuromancer (1984), the frontrunner in a movement dubbed "cyberpunk". Cyberpunk, and Blade Runner itself, influenced, adapted or birthed countless films (including The Matrix and Akira ) , comics and some Japanese manga, including Masamune Shirow's iconic, if intriguingly cerebral Ghost in the Shell , not to mention videogames, including the
