WELL 2019 is here. For fans of science fiction films it’s a year of particular significance, since it’s the year that Blade Runner (1982) is set in.

I enjoy looking at near future science fiction films and seeing what the film makers got right and wrong in their predictions of what kind of technology will be in existence.

So what of Blade Runner?

Well, for starters the plot hinges on the tracking down of a group of rogue replicants, androids so lifelike they cannot easily be distinguished from human counterparts. In reality robots can now do incredible things – but I think we’re a little way off them passing for human, which is maybe no bad thing.

Sad to say we’ve yet to start commuting in that sci-fi staple, the flying car.

In Blade Runner they’re called ‘spinners’, but are pretty much the same aerial automobiles seen in Back To The Future Part 2 (1989) and as far back as Metropolis (1927).

Unsurprisingly where we’ve gone beyond Runner’s predictions is in communication technology. There are data bases, but no internet and no smart phones.

In a scene that’s now rather quaint, Harrison Ford’s protagonist makes a video call to a client. To do so he uses what resembles a grubby looking cash-point machine in the corner of a bar.

The video feed is blurry and static filled. Thank goodness for face time!

In one of the film’s most iconic scenes Ford sits in his apartment and examines a photograph for evidence.

He places a physical photo into a machine that is then voice controlled to zoom in and out of the image until he finds what he’s looking for.

The machine is large and clunky. If Ford’s character Deckard had lived in our world, he could have taken the phone from his pocket, swiped with a touch of his fingers and blue-toothed the image to his printer in less than half the time.

Still, it wouldn’t have made for such a great piece of cinema.