Combined with larger questions about the nature of reality and what it really means to be human it's this convincing and well-thought-out sci-fi world Scott creates that invites five cuts and frequent re-watching. Almost more like a novel than a film, noticing something new with each visit.
Ridley Scott's vision of a future Los Angeles couldn't be much more different to the city we know today (though it's a lot closer now than it was in 1982). With its colossal skyscrapers, heavy pollution and torrential downpours looking more like a darker New York or even DC Comics' Gotham City. Like Alien before it, the film presents a "used future" only this time its nature itself that's falling apart not just a spaceship. Climatic change apparently wipeing out most animal life to the point where artificial copies are far more common and affordable and humans (those who can afford them) are forced to retreat to the "off-world colonies."
Perhaps the strangest thing about Scott's future LA, though, is that it seems completely riddled with Illuminati imagery and symbolism. Perhaps the most obvious example of this parapolitical iconography has to be the "All Seeing Eye."
Blade Runner opens with an extreme close-up of Harrison Ford's character Rick Deckard's eye and there are numerous other eye shots throughout the film. Eyes being important to the plot because they're the only way to tell the difference between replicants (artificial humans) and real humans. Replicant eyes involuntary glowing in certain scenes. However, is this really the All Seeing Eye of the Illuminati?
Interestingly, in his DVD commentary for The Final Cut Scott did admit that the eye imagery was meant to be reminiscent of George Orwell's dystopian Nineteen Eighty-Four and that it was meant to imply that the world of Blade Runner isn't that far removed from the totalitarian regime of the classic novel. Orwell's Nineteen Eighty-Four, of course, being a favourite tool of conspiracy theorists for explaining the kind of New World Order that the Illuminati are covertly constructing around us. Some researchers even speculating that Orwell (a former officer in the Indian Imperial Police) might have even based his novel largely on insider knowledge rather than being simply fiction. But let's get back to Blade Runner.
In his commentary, Scott explains that he and the writers (again echoing Orwell and Alien) envisioned Blade Runner as a future completely economically, technologically and politically dominated by three or less mega-corporations. In effect, it is a world caught in the iron grip of total corporatism: a situation disturbingly close to today but still a somewhat novel idea back in 1982 (unless you were a conspiracy buff, of course).
The largest and most powerful of these new interplanetary superpowers, of course, is the Tyrell Corporation. Named after its founder and almost God-like creator of the Nexus-6 series replicants: Dr Eldon Tyrell. A mega-genius with (like Dr Frankenstein and the Illuminati before him) little or no qualms about the morality of his experiments. Creating (artificial) men and women with at least equal intelligence to their genetic designers ... only to live a mere four years max as nothing more than off-world slaves before they "retire."
Tyrell's favourite motto "More human than human" can't help but ring some alarm bells for anyone who has ever seen Alex Jones' parapolitical blockbuster Endgame. In the documentary film, Jones chronicles the secret elite's plans to wipe out a staggering 80% of mankind and replace the species with what they believe is the next stage in human evolution: the post or transhuman. This "being" would be the perfect blending of man with machine, with cybernetics and genetic engineering at their zenith point, in other words, the partly organic "More human than human" replicants of Blade Runner.
However. it's the Tyrell Corporation's taste in architecture and wildlife that really sounds the Illuminati alarm. The Tyrell Headquarters are a gigantic seven hundred stories tall pyramided-shaped skyscraper. Perhaps resembling an Aztec or Ancient Egyptian pyramid.
A classic symbol associated with the Illuminati, the pyramid has always been an icon of authoritarianism and higher power. A meeting place between Heaven and Earth where great Kings and High Priests became gods in their peoples' eyes. Ridley Scott couldn't have picked a better design for the HQ of his replicants' post-modern father/maker and corporate dictator Tyrell.
In a documentary (Dangerous Days: The Making of Blade Runner) accompanying the DVD release of The Final Cut it's explained that a pyramid was chosen because in an older script, Tyrell was exposed to be a replicant copy. The real Tyrell having died and been cryogenically preserved in a giant glass sarcophagus at the centre of the pyramided complex. Tyrell HQ, in effect, then was originally envisioned as being a kind of tomb like the pyramids of the Pharaohs. Be that as it may, perhaps there is a better reason for the strange choice of 2019 architecture.
As well as power and authority, the pyramid is also the perfect physical representation of compartmentalisation: the Illuminati system of control. It exists as a dumbed-down humanity at the base with a tiny enlightened capstone elite ruling on top, i.e. exactly the kind of Orwellian society seemingly reflected in Blade Runner.
Finally, if all this Illuminati imagery and symbolism (the All Seeing Eye, the Pyramid of Compartmentalisation, never mind the Orwellian and transhumanist overtones) wasn't enough, when Deckard (Harrison Ford) first visits Tyrell HQ he is greeted by a replicant owl. The owl (according to Ridley Scott) being Tyrell's official mascot and emblem. Yet another, be it much less well known, Illuminati symbol.
In the film that really put him on the map, Dark Secrets Inside Bohemian Grove, Alex Jones exposed how the global elite meet in secret each year to take part in a strange and bizarre ceremony called the "Cremation of Care." This is an event which, as outlandish as it sounds, involves the worship and even mock human sacrifice of an infant to a deity they call the Great Owl of Bohemia (a giant 45-foot stone owl god complete with almost demonic-style horns). The horns particularly are most worrying because they're very reminiscent of the ancient Canaanite horned ideal Moloch, who, according to the Bible at least, really did have children sacrificed to it.
Did Ridley Scott really pick the owl as Tyrell's personal emblem and mascot because of its ancient association and meaning of wisdom, as most would argue? Or is there perhaps a double much darker meaning? When you put it all together: the owl, the pyramid, all the eye imagery, not to mention the fact that the only other animal replicant in the film is a snake, another Illuminati icon, it leaves little to no doubt that Scott and the writers must have done at least some research into Illuminati symbolism and imagery. Whether they believed in any of the conspiracy theories or not, is debatable and probably something we will never really know, but they must have been aware of them.
Some speculate that Philip K. Dick used remote viewing or other psychic means to write his books. Given that Hollywood celebrities like Arnold Swarchenegger have attended the bizarre Bohemian Grove, perhaps it's just possible Scott became intrigued that way. Whatever the truth, the Illuminati imagery adds a fascinating extra layer and realism to Scott's dystopian future that most people will sadly miss but still somehow know they're missing ... pulling them back again and again ... which is the genius of Ridley Scott.
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