The other thing is that it holds up for most people, so that it is better when you go back to it because you see thing you missed the first time.

Well,most of the time she didn't apreciate them because she watched a lot of TV movies in her teens, and knew most of the plots and twists.

Nope. Kids today have access to everything under the sun. The classics still resonate with them. My kid loves Queen and Zepplin. Enjoyed the hell out of "They Live", the Matrix and many other classic movies. Not so much John Carpenters "the Thing" which even I found a bit slow these days.

A lot of this was discovered without my introduction too. Music in particular.

Share the movies without explanation. Classics are universal.

What good recent scifi comes close? Dune? Bladerunner 2049?

But I agree it's hard to beat "the originals". I've come to the conclusion that it's probably just as much me that has changed.

I don't think Dune, the 2022 version will make it to the heights Blade Runner is at.

There are some scenes that give you Blade Runner level shivers (e.g. the Sardaukar assembly on Salusa Secundus), but they're few and far between.

And if you meant the original Dune ... nah, it certainly hasn't aged as well as BR.

Maybe it will rise to the levels of great sci-fi, maybe it will not, I won't judge it till I can see the complete picture. It has the correct aesthetic and the truly shiver-worthy moments are yet to come.

(Of course one should try and watch one of the longer cuts with more of the dialog and establishing scenes.)

You're right that they couldn't afford to shoot on-location for the desert scenes so instead they painted desert landscapes and scaled them up then printed them on 40-foot-high by 200-foot-wide transparencies and put bright lights behind them to illuminate the scenes.

They don't look anything like real life but they weren't really trying for realism as much as they were trying for artistry.

I think that when you view things through that lens, what they did craft was beautiful.

Absolutely, hehe. (I love the old Blade Runner, not at all the new one)

> I had a professor in college who was obsessed with Blade Runner and had us watch it in class.

To balance that out, our religion teacher showed us The Exorcist ( https://www.themoviedb.org/movie/9552-the-exorcist ) - sounds hard but to be fair anybody who did not want to watch it was allowed to leave the room & come back later.

Great movie, but many movies from the past fail to hold up simply due to lower production values... which also feeds into the storytelling element

Contrast the theatrical cut: https://youtu.be/AJzIT6fQ3OU (VO at 4:13) with the director's cut: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=NoAzpa1x7jU

The theatrical version is punchier because it's beating you over the head. For a film that's so heavily into metaphor (I mean, Rutger Hauer's character releases a dove at the end, maybe he just likes birds, we will never know since the VO doesn't explain it) it's quite boring to just be outright told what you're supposed to think. And even if you like your scenes explained in the most anodyne manner possible, it's well known that Harrison Ford was phoning it in for the overall performance but particularly the VO, so it's not even a well-done VO in terms of literal recording.

Hardly a 'diehard fan', I like the aesthetic but it's an incredibly slow film, but I hate that VO with a passion.