Comparison between "Brave New World" and "Blade Runner"

Essay by AEKHigh School, 12th gradeA+, March 2006

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The quality and importance of humanity's relationship with the natural world, or its response to the absence of the natural world is evident in a comparison between the opening sequence of "Blade Runner" and facets of "Brave new World". The, largely reactionary texts, rebukes science and its negative effect on the natural world whilst revealing the need for and importance of individuality. They present a hypothesized future where the natural order has been overturned and where the quality of life is a falling reductive rather than progressing.

Blade Runner is a criticizing comment on this progress of the times. For producer Ridely Scott, the cold-war climate saw scientific advancement become more immediate in everyday life. This is very evident in Brave New World's setting; the opening sequence establishes the city as the site of the urban dystopia. The probing camera presents a visual density in the frame; a post-holocaust cityscape with furnaces belching smoke into the night sky.

It appears that civilization on this planet is no longer civil. The metropolis reflects a state of despair.

Suitably this synthetic and hostile environment is paralleled and heightened by a disjointed musical accompaniment. Through the use of these layered special effects the responder is thrust into a reality which is alien and technologically determined.

The use of science fiction adds to the uncertainty of this world. Are we in the 1940s or indeed in the future?

"Half a century earlier, Brave New World exemplified the modernist values that literary works did not and could not simply reflect the world around them but were symptoms of its problems. For Huxley rapid post-WWI industrialization presented one such disconcerting social ill." His subsequent description of the 'bleakly shining porcelain of a laboratory' in the first chapter reveals the clinical setting and...