Watch: Video Essay Looks At The Modern Face Of Ridley Scott’s 'Blade Runner'

Most cinephiles regard “Blade Runner” as a seminal sci-fi film. It’s widely considered to be one of Ridley Scott’s very best, and also one of the earliest notable examples of what would later come to be known as cyberpunk. And yet what’s not so frequently mentioned is the film’s source material: that would be Philip K. Dick and his great post-apocalyptic novel “Do Androids Dream of Electric Sheep?” Dick’s books are often so dense and opaque that an average reader might deem them to be unfilmable, though Richard Linklater’s wooly “A Scanner Darkly” certainly gave it the old college try. “Blade Runner” is first and foremost a crackerjack genre film, action-packed and loaded with bizarre, indelible neon-lit iconography. It is also, however, a movie of sly intelligence – one whose deeper themes only come into focus after a couple of viewings.

“Blade Runner: The Other Side of Modernity,” a video essay from The Nerdwriter that highlights how Scott’s third film looks at quote-unquote modern...