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The title cards in Blade Runner are amazing

410 points · 200 comments · ExMachina73

  1. schoen · · focus · HN ↗
    With the em dashes and the conclusion "This was not called execution. It was called retirement." I expect a lot of people would believe today that these title cards were written by an LLM.
    1. roughly · · focus · HN ↗
      What’s sort of funny about that is there’s a normal thing whenever anyone who hasn’t seen it watches Blade Runner for the first time - often they come out feeling it’s kind of derivative, when the truth is that it feels that way because everything after Blade Runner copied Blade Runner.

      Add the initial title cards to that list too now, I guess.

      1. mindcrime · · focus · HN ↗
        It's been reported that William Gibson saw Blade Runner before releasing Neuromancer and was worried that people would think he stole ideas from Blade Runner, as the aesthetic of Blade Runner was so close to the way he imagined the Neuromancer world. Now in turn people are worried that the Apple TV adaptation of Neuromancer will feel derivative because so many subsequent works are its hereditary kin.

        What can ya do?

        1. AlanYx · · focus · HN ↗
          >Now in turn people are worried that the Apple TV adaptation of Neuromancer will feel derivative because so many subsequent works are its hereditary kin.

          Neuromancer is particularly vulnerable to this because so much of the original Matrix film is very strongly inspired by Neuromancer, down to reused place names (Zion), the clothing Trinity wears (even the iconic glasses are an alternative to Molly's eye implants), the lobby scene (compare to the Panther Moderns lobby raid), the concept of payphones as a way to cross the boundary between the real and the virtual, etc. I almost have a "memory" of the phone scene in the Istanbul airport in Neuromancer being mirrored in the Matrix movies. It's not actually there, at least not directly, but there's so much overlap between these two that it's an easy false memory.

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