I Love the Early 80s

Recently I became inspired to revisit Sir Ridley Scott's 1982 Sci-Fi Classic Blade Runner and yes it's as iconic as it's ever been and Rutger Hauer is mesmerising as Roy Batty and there's always something new to find in the immense visuals (I'm very fond of the Dancers wearing the Hockey Masks.)

But it was a combination of revisiting that film as well as thinking about X-Men Apocalypse which is set in 1983 that really got me thinking about something.

And that was just how much I love and I mean genuinely love the period of the early 1980s lets say 1980 to 1984 and the reasons I feel are three key ones:

- The first was that it consisted of this incredible group of filmmakers who were making their mark on the industry people like George Lucas and Steven Spielberg, Richard Donner, Brian De Palma, Martin Scorsese, Ridley Scott and George Miller who were either coming out of film school or starting to make it big after doing some small little films with no real money behind them.

And they along with John Carpenter, Peter Weir and Francis Ford Coppola took an industry that had become moribund and directionless following the collapse of the studio system in the late 60s and gave it a new sense of direction with films like Raiders of the Lost Ark, Mad Max 2, Gallipoli, Blade Runner, The Empire Strikes Back and Raging Bull among many others and in each of these films there's a sense of exhilaration, craftsmanship and a sense of doing things that hadn't been tried before and would later set a benchmark for future generations to follow.

- Secondly there seemed to be no real restrictions on what you could depict at that time, you could have a film like Summer Lovers by Randal Kleiser which has multiple scenes of its lead characters nude and its Menage A Troi storyline and really only get an M rating.

Sadly however a film like that or 1984's Blame it on Rio with Michael Caine would never get made today as Nudity has pretty much become frowned upon because well it could warp some younglings mind oh heaven forfend they see some bare tits they're going to when they're older.

Also a dark film like Blade Runner would also struggle as it did in 1982 as Audiences by and large are wanting the "Happy Comfort Food" like they did back then and the more serious minded films like Apocalypse and Dawn of Justice get mixed to negative reviews from audiences and critics.

- And lastly it was to be the dawn of the VHS format and this would become a profound and fundamental change to the way movies would be both presented and released.

Profound in that no longer could films just play in cinemas for long periods of time (and this is both a for good and for bad situation) instead they would play for a period and then hit the Home Video shelves where people could rent and one day own them to watch in their own home and fundamental as it put the Power to the People at Home so to speak.

But when did this period end well I feel that it ended in 1984 with the rise of MTV and Studios and Producers reasserting their dominance over filmmaking as by that time films like Heaven's Gate had nearly driven some studios to the point of bankruptcy and Spielberg himself had a huge bomb in 1941 which forced him to rethink his shooting style when making Raiders of the Lost Ark.

Now don't get me wrong I like that period of the mid to late 80s and early 90s as well but not as much as I do that 1980 to 1984 period of filmmaking as it felt like anything was possible, an industry that had begun to lose its way had been rejuvenated and viewers could take more control over the content they chose to watch and how they chose to watch it, we may indeed never see a period of films like this ever again.