I like how Stan Lee did it with the X-Men, he just said “in the not-so-distant future.”
One thing that always brings me out of the fantasy when watching movies from a couple of years ago is when someone meets another person at the gate in the airport.
This thread has gotten me to thinking about time travel and morality. And rather than hijacking this thread with some of my thoughts, I’ve started a GD thread on them. Your comments are welcome.
Yeah, but this is more in the style of snowboarding. It’s very extreme 
If it does, it will probably confuse people as to when it was made. It looks a whole lot more like surfing than it does like skateboarding or snowboarding, IMHO.
That’s odd. It looks like someone standing on a shield sliding down stairs to me. 
XXX did it to. I remember thinking how SEVENish it looked.
I love Blade Runner, but the whole look of it is very eighties. I’m not sure exactly which bits it is, but the costuming, hairstlyes, and film quality certainly contribute. The dark lighting and its style (not just in the office scene) and some of the other effects very strongly scream 80’s to me, and IIRC (I recently picked up the DvD but haven’t rewatched it yet) the hand to hand fighting styles are right out of the ‘80’s movie fighting handbook’.
Not to mention Edward James Olmos!
Some things are cyclical…if everybody’s smoking in a movie, it’s either from the 1940’s or the 1990’s.
A film noir aesthetic screams 1980’s to you? How old are you?
Actually, the dark lighting of Blade Runner (and Alien, and Legend, 1492 and so on) screams Ridley Scott to me.
Weponry always can date a film. Like the camcorder sized helmet cams in Aliens or how the Steyr Aug is used as a “futuristic” rifle.
Gunfights will always date a movie. In the old days, you heard the characteristic kashoo kashoo the bad guy grabs his chest and falls off the cliff screaming. Every year the noise, mussle flashes and guns themselves got bigger and bigger until every gunfight is between two guys on wires firing double Uzis while bullets spray out and blow apart concrete and steel as if they were dueling with two 20mm Vulcan cannons.
Mmmmmmmmmmmm. Cashews.
A bit too literal? It’s only a god damned movie. In other words, make believe? If we demanded a logical explantion for every fictional work, then 99.9 percent of all movies, plays and novels would collapse under the scrutiny.
I keep higher standards. Unless the story is silly, allegorical, etc., I expect it to be internally consistent and have some degree of realism.
Blade Runner attempts to tie its setting to the real world, and because of that I expect some kind of plausibility. When they set it in early 21st Century Los Angeles they should have put some thought into what’s possible by then. Some excesses are acceptable, but there are a few things that damage it’s immersiveness for me, which is a shame as it’s one of my favorite movies.
I just recalled this short lived action-adventure series that MTV aired in the early 90’s that’s hopelessly dated by a particular line of dialogue.
The series was Dead at 21 and it dealt with a guy on the run from the feds because he found out on his 20th birthday that he was part of a government experiment to implant intellegence-enhancing computer chips into the brains of babies. The twist being of course, that the other test subjects have all been dying by age 21 because of the whole “Candle that burns twice as bright lasts half as long” premise.
One episode, the protagonist is trying to track down information about the scientist involved in the project, and he decides to do a little research on the internet. His friend pipes up “the internet? What’s that?”
I don’t think it’s reasonable to use the “it’s only a movie” argument in a thread whose purpose is, essentially, nitpicking.
How about this for dating movies from the 90s?
A bunch of angst-ridden 20 somethings in flannel shirts hanging around coffee shops fearing the future and dealing with relationship problems while Tori Amos or Soundgarden plays in the background.
This still happens. It occured in About Schmidt, set my sensors off.
Racial/ethnic terms, which change so quickly these days (at least in the U.S.), will date our movies:[ul][li]colored[/li][li]negro[/li][li]black[/li][li]afro-american[/li][li]person of color[/li][li]african-american[/li][li]mexican[/li][li]chicano[/li][li]hispanic[/li][li]oriental[/li][li]asian[/li][/ul]