ANOTHER OLD MOVIE

While I’m going on about old movies, today I’m re-watching Blade Runner again. The original one, from 1982, directed by Ridley Scott and based on the book by Philip K Dick. It stars Harrison Ford, still looking fairly young, as this was only five years on from the original Star Wars.

It is a very dark movie, but it’s so well done that it’s absolutely engrossing. In 1982 some of those scenes must have been quite mind boggling. In fact many of them still are.

The movie is full of classic quotes. They are not so much quotes as samples now, because they have since appeared in music videos and other movies. Classic lines like Leon the replicant saying “Let me tell you about my mother” are right up there with Dirty Harry asking “Do you feel lucky, punk?”
 

It was set in what must have seemed like a bleak distant future back in 1982 - 2019. A scary dark future world. The scariest thing about 2019 from the current viewpoint of 2025, is that we now look back to it as the last year of a sort happy innocent pre-covidhoax era, before everything got well and truly screwed up.

Predictably, the more recent sequel staring Ryan Gossling, “Blade Runner 2049” (2017) is unimaginative, slow, boring, and depressing, so I don’t recommend that one. It’s a sad letdown compared to the amazing original.

I’ve long been a big fan of Philip K Dick, and despite the fact that these days I’m asking questions like “did he have deeper motivations for the dark visions he described?”, I still think the original Blade Runner was a spectacular and visionary movie that was decades ahead of it’s time and truly original.

A DIFFERENT WORLD

Most of the movies I watch are fairly old. The main reason for that is because modern movies are all utter crap. 

Yesterday I looked at a list of the top 100 movies so far in 2025 by box office returns. There was only one movie this year I’ve seen or even had any desire to see – F1 staring Brad Pitt. 

It was fairly entertaining with some good action scenes, but it was also too long at times, and the acting was fairly predictable and average. It was pretty good but is often compared unfavorably to the earlier F1 movie "Rush" (2013) staring Chris Hemsworth and Daniel Brühl, which arguably had a better plot and only cost a fraction of the amount to make.

The other 99 movies in the list all look totally lame and gay, so much so that I would probably pay money to not have to watch most of them, and if there was even one other movie I actually did want to see, I’d just find a torrent and download a copy, as I did with F1.

Here is the Top 20 - what a bunch of crap! And it gets even worse from Snow White down to 100th place...

So it really isn’t a mystery why the movie industry is losing so much money. They spend hundreds of millions making boring woke crap, that very few people actually pay to see. The real mystery is why they appear to be so clueless about how to provide entertainment - what are they really up to?

Part of the attraction of watching old movies, apart from the fact that some of them are light years better than anything that has come out in the past 10 years, is to be able to visit different worlds. Ones without computers, or cell phones, or an internet.

In movies made before 1985, (yes, only 40 years ago) there was no digital crap at all. Nobody had it, nobody wanted it, there were entire realities functioning without it. Yesterday I re-watched Magnum Force staring Clint Eastwood from 1973. It’s an entertaining classic, and some of it is pretty awesome.

I’m fully confident that in 50 years time, nobody is going to be watching any movies from 2025 and using words like “awesome”. 

Either the future will be so totally crap that enslaved subservient humanity won’t even understand concepts like “awesome”, or it will actually be an awesome future. In which case they will look back at the movies from 2025 and wonder why anyone even bothered to make them.

Despite feeling a bit daunted sometimes, I’m still aspiring to option two, the awesome future. And avoiding seeing any crappy modern movies is part of how to avoid the horrible futures they endlessly depict.