Blade Runner

Blade Runner – opening scene.

Blade runner starts off with an establishing shot, this is used to allow the audience to establish the ‘film world’, in blade runner the establishing shot at the beginning tells us that the film is set in a futuristic city. The futuristic city that we see in the establishing shot resembles hell, as the city is full of fire, darkness, smoke and lightening.

One of the themes of blade runner are shown in this opening scene using an extreme close up of a person’s eye reflecting the fire and explosions they are seeing. Using this extreme close up creates a mystery as the audience are denied of the eyes identity; therefore as an audience we begin to guess what type of person the character is. From the close up we could gather that seeing the reflection in the eye could mean that danger is linked with the character. The eye also makes the audience wonder if it belongs to a significant character and if it will be a continuous theme throughout the film. People will often use eyes to tell what somebody is feeling as you can see peoples emotions through eyes, this could be a hidden message to foreshadow he events that will happen later on in the film.