Syd Mead drew the weather

Mead was brought on to design vehicles. The decision that mattered was one he made while doing it: he drew the environments the vehicles would sit in, on the reasoning that a car is meaningless without a street.

Every subsequent film about the future has been arguing with those streets. The permanent rain, the advertising at architectural scale, the layering of old buildings retrofitted with new machinery rather than replaced by it — that is a specific and contestable theory of how cities age, and it did not come from the director.

Jordan Cronenweth lit it, which is the other half. But the world existed on paper before anyone lit anything, and the person who put it there was a concept artist with a credit — visual futurist — that exists precisely because no existing title covered what he had done.