Since I was a kid, I’ve been fascinated by science fiction films. One of my favorites was “Blade Runner” from 1982. Set in the year 2019, it made me wonder what the future would really be like in 40 years. Would it become as the film envisioned? Flying cars, holographic billboards, androids, and ultra-modern and overcrowded cities? Now that I’ve made it beyond 2019, over 40 years after Blade Runner’s depressing dystopian future played out before all of us, I am relieved that the world is not as bad as was predicted by the movie.
If given the chance, I would happily tell my worried younger self that the Blade Runner 2019 is different from the 2019 I lived through. Some technology from the 80s film made it to our world, and there are other things the movie did get right: the lights, the architecture, the dance of glass and steel and stone, the dazzling thoroughfares that dance and weave among towers that fight for the sky, the millions of heartbeats that create the city’s rhythms, harmonizing with the buzz of electricity and the thrum of engines. That is what I see in this photo I took from atop a tower in Roppongi Hills in Tokyo, Japan. This sight, my vision, was inspired by Ridley Scott’s own vision. Although Blade Runner was set in L.A. it was heavily influenced by Japan's technological boom of the 1980s and Tokyo's rapidly rising metropolis. This image is as close as I can get to what that film evoked, and awoke, in me.
