Read all the Blade Runner posts in chronological order.
The Black Lives Matter protests are still going strong, 14 days after George Floyd was murdered by police in Minneapolis, and thank goodness. Things have to change. It still feels a little wan to post anything to this blog about niche interests in the design of interfaces in science fiction, but I also want to wrap Blade Runner up and post an interview I’ve had waiting in the wings for a bit so I can get to a review of Black Panther (2018) to further support black visibility and Black Lives Matter issues on this platform that I have. So in the interest of that, here’s the report card for Blade Runner.
It is hard to understate Blade Runner’s cultural impact. It is #29 of hollywoodreporter.com’s best movies of all time. Note that that is not a list of the best sci-fi of all time, but of all movies.
When we look specifically at sci-fi, Blade Runner has tons of accolades as well. Metacritic gave it a score of 84% based on 15 critics, citing “universal acclaim” across 1137 ratings. It was voted best sci-fi film by The Guardian in 2004. In 2008, Blade Runner was voted “all-time favourite science fiction film” in the readers’ poll in New Scientist (requires a subscription, but you can see what you need to in the “peek” first paragraph). The Final Cut (the version used for this review) boasts a 92% on rottentomatoes.com. In 1993 the U.S. National Film Registry selected it for preservation in the Library of Congress as being “culturally, historically, or aesthetically significant.” Adam Savage penned an entire article in 2007 for Popular Mechanics, praising the practical special effects, which still hold up. It just…it means a lot to people.
As is my usual caveat, though, this site reviews not the film, but the interfaces that appear in the film, and specifically, across three aspects.
Sci: B (3 of 4) How believable are the interfaces?
My first review was titled “8 Reasons the Voight-Kampf Machine is shit” so you know I didn’t think too highly of that. But also Deckard’s front door key wouldn’t work like that, and the photo inspector couldn’t work like that. So I’m taken out of the film a lot for these things just breaking believability.
It’s not all 4th-wall-crumbling-ness. Bypassing the magical anti-gravity of the spinners, the pilot interfaces are pretty nice. The elevator is bad design, but quite believable. The VID-PHŌN is serviceable. Replicants are the primary novum in the story, so the AGI gets a kind-of genre-wide pass, and though the design is terrible, it’s the kind of stupidity we see in the world, so, sure.
Fi: B (3 of 4) How well do the interfaces inform the narrative of the story?
The Voight-Kampf Machine excels at this. It’s uncanny and unsettling, and provides nice cinegenic scenes that telegraph a broader diegesis and even feels philosophical. The Photo Inspector, on the surface, tells us that Deckard is good at his job, as morally bankrupt as it is.
The Spinners and VID-PHŌN do some heavy lifting for worldbuilding, and as functional interfaces do what they need to do, though they are not key storybeats.
But there were lots of missed opportunities. The Elevator and the VID-PHŌN could have reinforced the constant assault of advertisement. The Photo Inspector could have used an ad-hoc tangible user interface to more tightly integrate who Deckard is with how he does his work and the despair of his situation. So no full marks.
Interfaces: F (0 of 4) How well do the interfaces equip the characters to achieve their goals?
This is where the interfaces fail the worst. The Voight-Kampf Machine is, as mentioned in the title of the post, shit. Deckard’s elevator forces him to share personally-identifiable information. The Front Door key cares nothing about his privacy and misses multifactor authentication. The Spinner looks like a car, but works like a VTOL aircraft. The Replicants were engineered specifically to suffer, and rebel, and infiltrate society, to no real diegetic point.
The VID-PHŌN is OK, I guess.
Most of the interfaces in the film “work” because they were scripted to work, not because they were designed to work, and that makes for very low marks.
Final Grade C (6 of 12), Matinée.
I have a special place in my heart for both great movies with faltering interfaces, and unappreciated movies with brilliant ones. Blade Runner is one of the former. But for its rich worldbuilding, its mood, and the timely themes of members of an oppressed class coming head-to-head with a murderous police force, it will always be a favorite. Don’t not watch this film because of this review. Watch it for all the other reasons.
