Blade Runner VS. Towca Androidow

I was recently talking with a friend of mine about the Polish posters made for major American releases (I promise you that is as close as this blog will get to discussing my personal life, I just wanted to cite my source as someone cooler than myself who reminded me of the existence of these posters).

I really can't remember why Poland has awesome posters which don't use any publicity stills, but they are a really great example of something being an effective ad while still being a creative expression.

To use one Polish poster as an example: the movie Blade Runner is an awesomely badass movie and yet the only poster I've ever seen made for its 1982 release is pretty weak, especially when you know how many excellent shoots from the movie would have made a really interesting poster without any adjustments. Here it is for demonstration purposes:



The bottom half is okay with a drawing of the awesome future skyscrapers, but the illustrations of both Sean Young and Harrison Ford in the top half cause the poster overall to cram too many images into one space without any real focal point or overall scheme.

This wouldn't be so bad if the drawings of the two starts weren't so poorly executed. The illustration of Young looks like it is bored, and blending her hair into the background makes it look like she has a Mr. Spock hair cut. The Ford drawing is drastically worse. I said the drawing has no focal point, and this is why. Ford, being the star, is supposed to be the focal point, and his image is supposed to sell the movie. This fails miserably since Ford represented here is all sweaty and with dead eyes. He looks like one of the less attractive members of the cast of Trainspotting in that one scene where people are crawling around Ewan McGregor's ceiling.


Compare that poster to the awesome Polish poster for the movie:



This really speaks for itself, gaze upon its awesomeness. It works great on a pop art level. As I will constantly have to say when I try an analyze images here from an aesthetic point of view, I know nothing about art or design, but everything here just looks great: the negative space formed around the central figure, the font of the title, the way her gun is going off out of the frame, the lines used to draw her hair, the angle her head is turned at.

So I don't think there can be much of an argument made that the American Blade Runner poster is better looking, but I supposes it does do a better job of giving the consumer an idea of what the movie is about.

But I do not however think it does a better job of selling the movie to its audience. Which movie would you rather see? The one set in the future about the guy who appears to be in the midst of heroin night sweats? Or the one about the chick in the bikini shooting stuff.