Essay on Frankenstein and Blade Runner: Similarities and Differences

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The two texts Frankenstein and Blade Runner may be divided by nearly 200 years, be
Conveyed in different forms and develop their ideas in very different settings but there are
Distinct similarities between them.
Mary Shelley frames her book with a series of letters making it an epistolary novel. She deals with a horrifying topic which produces fear and loathing in those who read it making it a gothic text, but she also creates a new genre in that she does not follow the conventions of the gothic novel. Her book was based on the science of the time and projections of what was believed to be possible. In this way it foregrounds modern science fiction.
-First person narration -Letters
-Dialogue
-Rhetorical questions Ch5
-Religious allusions
-Repetition of the word “loathing”
-Absence of a name for the monster Blade Runner has been described as a hybrid of romance, Gothic thriller, film noir, crime and science fiction genres.
Some of the features of film noir are:
Location and visual effects:
_ Expressionistic lighting: eg dark rooms with light slicing through venetian blinds or struggling through fans
_ Unusual camera angles that show the vulnerability of the characters
_ Silences broken by garbage bin lids, swishing of the fan or subdued voices
_ Spiralling smoke
_ Dark alleyways, backstreets, narrow apartment building corridors and gloomy offices
_ Skewed camera angles- disorienting visuals
_ Jazz tunes
Characters
_ Dried out detective who has seen it all and has a cynical view of life- misogynistic antiheroes
_ Two types of female: in the worthy traditional supportive role or femme fatale, leading the anti-hero into a spider’s trap
Mood and ideas
_ Criminal violent
_ Moral conflict
_ Sense of hopelessness
_ Melancholic
_ Alienation from environment and from people
_ Bleakness
_ Disillusionment
_ Weary of fighting evil

Deckard, a blade runner, is entrusted with the task of bringing in six rebel replicants. The world they live in is an environmental disaster where the skies are taken over by toxic fumes and air vehicles that manoeuvre through projected advertisements. The rebels are artificially created - the latest batch of robots designed to enhance the lifestyle of humans on new colonies off the earth but they are so intelligent that they have demanded to return to the earth and claim their place. They are however unable to fulfil their lifespan because of a failsafe measure that has been installed in them.

The film starts near the end of the quest. The viewer is filled in on the background with the text incorporated in the opening titles:
Early in the 21st Century, THE TYRELL
CORPORATION advanced Robot evolution into the NEXUS phase - a being virtually identical to a human - known as a Replicant.
The NEXUS 6 Replicants were superior in strength and agility, and at least equal in intelligence, to the genetic engineers who created them.
Replicants were used Off-world as slave labor, in the hazardous exploration and colonization of other planets.
After a bloody mutiny by a NEXUS 6 combat team in an Off-world colony,
Replicants were declared illegal on earth - under penalty of death.
Special police squads - BLADE RUNNER
UNITS - had orders to shoot to kill, upon detection, any trespassing Replicant.
This was not called execution.
It was called retirement.

The event of Roy Batty’s death is symbolically marked by the flight of a dove, whose purity and connection to the spirit elevates Roy to the status of a human being with a soul. Ultimately, in a world that is dominated by corporate greed, it is the artificial humans with their connection to animals who retain the qualities traditionally associated with humanity. The huge bulk of the Tyrell building is filmed from a low camera angle, its powerful pyramidal structure emphasised by the pattern of strong vertical and horizontal lines to flatten the street stalls below into insignificance. The
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