Alphaville Film Noir

Not since Jean-Luc Godard’s Alphaville (1965), a French classic science fiction noir, has a film like Ridley Scott’s Blade Runner (1982), an American neo-noir, evoked such an unconventional, dark, and gritty sci-fi tale involving a cynical police detective on the trail of murdering androids called “replicants” that look identical to humans. The film takes place in a futuristic, overcrowded, rain-soaked metropolis of Los Angele in the year 2019. “The infrastructure looks a lot like now, except older and more crowded, and with the addition of vast floating zeppelins, individual flying cars, and towering buildings of unimaginable size. When I first saw the film I was impressed by the giant billboards with moving, speaking faces on them, touting

in 1982 with a budget of $28 million, but only made $33.8 million at the box office as it received lackluster responses, “routinely panned and even attacked by test audiences, the film fared little better in theaters. In fact, it was a certified box office flop. Virtually no one, it seems, liked Blade Runner. Fortunately, in the three decades since it first debuted on the big screen, viewers discovering the film on cable TV and DVD have come to appreciate it as not only a cult film par excellence but an emotionally challenging, thematically complex work whose ideas and subtexts are just as startling as its now famous production designs” (Huffingtonpost). Today, globally fans, film critics, and philosophy teachers have praised the film for its example on “defining what it means to be human (and) the increasingly dilemma faced by contemporary society, that is, the most vital question confronting us is how to maintain our humanity in the face of overwhelming technologies that tend to dehumanize us“ (Huffingtonpost). A sobering thought, considering how the public today is thoroughly inundated with advance technology that is suppose to bring us closer together, but has instead produced a more detached society with short attention