Bladerunner

I had never seen Bladerunner before watching it in class but I have to say that it was a very interesting film with a lot of underlying ideas being expressed throughout about what it means to be human. I think that the heavy use of showing close ups of eyes in the movie is meant to make the viewer think about their humanity. The first shot that you see with eyes is a pair of eyes with a reflection of a large city in them. Upon first seeing this scene it seems a little odd to be showing a shot of the city as the reflection off of someone's eyes but by the end I begin to wonder who's eyes that were. To the best of my memory they do not show who it was that was overlooking the city which means it could have been a human or a Replicant. The fact that they do not show you who it is makes it impossible for the viewer to tell the difference and I believe that that is supposed to be a demonstration of one of the ideas that I thought the story brought on very well which was that these Replicants are as human as any actual person in the film. Throughout the film there are many more close up shots of the characters eyes which I again believe means to show the viewer that there is no difference between humans and Replicants.

This theme in the movie got really strong by the end, I felt, as Sebastian and Deckard were having their final fight. It became more and more obvious that although Sebastian has his physical differences that he and Deckard are one and the same. Throughout the entire film Sebastian has been following clues, hunting people, and looking for his maker while Deckard has been following clues, hunting the Replicants, and looking for Sebastian. They are following the same pattern which makes you wonder who exactly is supposed to be the good guy in all of this. I think that Deckard knew felt all along that the Bladerunners were not the good guys because of the way that he would react every time that he had to kill one of the Replicants. He would always act as if he were a police officer that was forced to kill a human being. Deckard was capable of looking deeper into these androids and seeing that they were more than just machines. I think that Rachel played a role in his realization of this because she forced him to question what it means to be human when he discovered that she did not even know that she wasn't. Rachel put the idea into his head even more when she asked him if he had ever taking the test, meaning that she was asking him how he could be so certain that he was not a Replicant. The entire story carries a lot of questions about what it means to be a human and how things would be different if there were real life creatures like the Replicants.