Blade Runner

Saturday, March 22nd, 2008 @ 11:47 pm | Movies

This is a post about the impact of Blade Runner, on me, on the culture, and about how it was made and what makes it different from other movies.

Blade Runner, Phase 1: 1982 – 1992

I was 12 when Blade Runner came out in 1982. Same year as E.T.. Same year as Tron, Wrath of Khan, Poltergeist, The Thing, The Dark Crystal, Sword & the Sorcerer. Something important was happening in SF in 1982, but that’s a subject for another post.

As with Alien three years earlier, when I saw Blade Runner in the theater I had no idea what I was looking at. I was too young and it was too weird compared to stuff I responded to, like Star Trek and E.T.. The film I was seeing was completely impenetrable to me. I’m not even sure it’s fair to say I was confused, only that whatever it was transmitting, I wasn’t receiving. Many years later, I would identify the opening shot of the film as the acid test; will you like this movie? A giant eye, who’s eye you do not know, stares at you with some hell-like cityscape reflected in it.

In that moment, either you say “whoah” and look in wonder, or you say “what is that? What am I looking at? Who’s eye is that? What’s going on?” Many people had that second reaction. I had the first. I didn’t understand what was happening, but visually I was blown away. Much of my pre-teen youth was spent imagining a futuristic world with neon and glass.

If you were any older than I was in the 70s, if you were a teenager for instance, you’d think the kind of shit you saw at the local mall, in stores like Spencer’s Gift, was crap. Lava lamps and Fiberoptic plants (made with real glass, not plastic) and blacklights were all stoner culture or gold-chain wearing disco crap or summat.

I was too young to know what I was supposed to think about this stuff, so I thought it was awesome. There was a kind of synergy happening between this cheap, tacky decoration and the movies I was seeing, which often also meant going to the mall. At home, everything was decorated like Mary’s apartment in the Mary Tyler Moore show, but in the movies and at the mall, it was the future. When I see the way everything’s lit in the original Star Trek movie, I’m still taken right back to being a kid in the 70s and thinking the future would look like that. There’s something atmospheric about it. It’s dark, it’s not well-lit. I still want the future to look like that.

I grew up in New Hampshire. I had no inkling I wouldn’t spend the rest of my life there, But round about the age of 12 I started to yearn for something else. Basically, I was sick of being surrounded by forests everywhere I went. Green was starting to annoy me. I wanted the world I saw in the movies. This world I imagined was an amalgam of the suburbias from E.T., Close Encounters of the Third Kind, and Poltergeist, and the future of the Star Trek movie, the neon from Blade Runner.

When my mom got a job offer to move to Southern California, specifically Long Beach, she came to me and explained the situation. She said “We won’t go unless you want to.” This was wisdom. The trip would be arduous no matter how you slice it and she didn’t want to drag a sulking 12 year old with her. Also, she didn’t want to uproot me from everything I had known. She moved around a lot as a kid and wasn’t consulted and she wanted me to be in on the decision.

I took some time to think about it. Of course, I had no idea what moving meant, except I’d be away from all my friends. But I was leaving 6th grade and starting in a new private school where I knew no one. This was a pretty expensive school and there was a lot of pressure on me and I reasoned that leaving New Hampshire for California meant leaving that pressure behind, and I wasn’t going to see my friends anymore anyway since they’d be at a different school.

It was a commercial on television that closed the deal. I remember where and when I was when I saw it. It was a Penzoil commercial done as a tie-in to the Long Beach Grand Prix and it showed downtown Long Beach in all its glory. All steel and glass and shining towering modern buildings. And nary a forest in sight. “I want to live there,” I said, and the decision was made.

Basically, I wanted to move to the Los Angeles of Blade Runner. We ended up moving to Cypress, not Long Beach, but even now, 20+ years later, when I drive home and take the 405 to the 105, an overpass that stretches so high up into the air that you can see all the way across the Los Angeles basin and see the Hollywood sign on the other side, I see Blade Runner.

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At night the entire city is glowing with these sodium lamps laid out in a perfect grid, and LAX is behind you so the planes coming in to land suddenly go from being very bright and randomly arranged stars in the sky to being a perfect line, a necklace of light stretching out to infinity. I get my wish. Every weeknight, I get to live in the world of Blade Runner for a few moments. People sometimes wonder at me how I can drive from Orange County to L.A. every day and it’s not pleasant, let me tell you. But among the many things that make it bearable, sometimes even enjoyable, is spending a few minutes every night in Blade Runner.

Visually, the movie left a big impression on me but narratively it was like watching a movie in a foreign language. My love for the movie didn’t begin until the summer of 1984, two years later.

This was the advent of home video. I still remember renting a VCR from Best Video in the Alpha-Beta center on the corner of Ball and Bloomfield. My grandfather, a relatively wealthy technophile, had a VCR in, like, 1976. The damn thing was as big as a suitcase, but my mom, single parent, could not afford one. So we rented a VCR every other weekend and I remember the very first movie we ever rented; Firefox. Great movie.

I never rented Blade Runner, I taped it off TV. I taped a lot of stuff off TV. Blade Runner, Alien, Brazil, The Meaning of Life. I would meticulously sit through the entire recording process, pausing the movie at the commercials, which was an art in itself. You had to know the timing of the commercials and also the response time of the VCR and some VCRs, when you paused, would rewind the tape just a little bit and you had to compensate for that.

Looking back on this experience, sitting on the carpet in front of the big TV, remote in hand, seems now to be incredibly archaic. Like a kid in the ’30s fiddling with vacuum tubes to listen to the radio. And, in a sense, that’s exactly what the experience was like. VCRs weren’t anything like DVD players. They had dozens of little buttons and dials most of which were there to improve the picture or compensate for some failing of your cable or TV. It was, in retrospect, very like the early days of radio.

I spent the entire summer watching that movie. Well, not literally the entire summer, but almost. This was the summer between Junior High School and High School. I was spending much less time with my friends in my apartment complex and hadn’t yet formed the high school friendships that would carry me through the rest of my life. Sometimes I would watch Blade Runner three times in a single day.

I was watching it the way you read a comic. Looking at the same images over and over. Finding more, absorbing more. This is something I can’t imagine doing now, but when you’re a kid you can hyperfocus on something in a way you cannot as an adult. I had no sense of time passing, no concept of “wasting time,” I was perfectly happy to close the blinds, turn out the lights, and run the movie again. My own private screening room.

It may seem strange and, indeed, it is a little strange, but this was something you could do with Blade Runner that you couldn’t do with any other movie. It contained a level of detail unseen in any film before. It was richly layered. The sheer scale of what you’re seeing is almost unfathomable. The costume design of the people on the street was done by several different artists, each representing a different class of person. The vehicles were designed, not just by artists, but by engineers. Syd Mead knew how his designs worked. The parking meters in Blade Runner have elaborate signs explaining how to use them and what will happen if you abuse them (they’ll shock you and kill you!) The magazines, which you never see, on the newsstands have covers and articles on the front imagined by the production designers.

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There’s a reason this film has so much detail. There was an actor’s strike, and they script wasn’t done. So for several months the crew did nothing except design and build more detail into the set. This is a lesson to the generations inspired by Blade Runner. You can’t create something like this on a normal budget or a normal schedule. It takes something extraordinary.

One reason I was responding so intensely to the film was that, sitting there in my living room, experiencing the movie over and over, I discovered that there was a potent story in there. Certainly overwhelmed by the visuals and the Storyverse, but these replicants, more human than the humans in the movie, and Deckard’s chase to kill them, is emotionally effective.

In the film, Rick Deckard is a Blade Runner, a term Scott borrowed from a completely different Science Fiction novel. Blade Runners hunt down replicants, called ‘Andys’ short for Androids, in the book. Replicants are illegal on Earth, and that very statement tells us that there’s a somewhere else, the rest of the Solar System out there with human beings on it. Before we ever hear about the “Off-world Colonies” we know they exist. Why replicants are illegal on Earth is never explained. Probably some kind of Union issue.

They wrote but never filmed a scene on one of the off-world colonies where Roy Batty emerges, alive, from a pile of dead replicants, and begins his bloody escape to Earth. Would that scene have been cool? Sure. But I don’t think we needed it.

Deckard hunts down the replicants one by one until the end and a long, gritty confrontation with their leader, Roy Batty. Throughout this process we watch as Deckard becomes more human. That’s what the movie is about. Deckard is just a machine when we meet him. Someone with a job and he does that job unthinkingly. It’s this last assignment that changes everything. He meets a girl who has an effect on him, and turns out to be a replicant herself, though she doesn’t know it. Deckard finds himself confronting her cruelly about her past, or lack thereof, and afterwards regrets it. Regret, over hurting what he’s previously looked at as a glorified toaster. It is this confrontation with a robot who believes she’s a human, whom Deckard believed was a human at first, that starts his journey.

When he kills the first of the renegade replicants, Zhora, he feels like shit afterwards. “The report would read: ‘routine retirement of a replicant.’ That didn’t make me feel any better about shooting a woman in the back.” He’s changing, seeing these things as people.

At the end of the confrontation with Roy on the rooftops, he’s made an important transition. Throughout the movie we’ve felt much more for the replicants than the humans. The replicants are desperate and alone and afraid and confused. Confronting their own mortality. Watching Zhora trying desperately to escape, watching Pris and Roy with J.F. Sebastian, you’re filled with compassion for these people.

At the end, watching Roy die, we feel for Deckard for the first time. Feel compassion for him, because he’s stopped being a midless bureaucrat and started feeling like a human being for the first time.

The film is dense and confusing and some of it, frankly, doesn’t make a lot of sense. Ford famously complained that he played a detective who didn’t do any detecting and that’s exactly how it felt watching it. Zhora is really the only replicant he finds himself, the rest find him or draw him to them. There are lots of glaring ADR problems and cut corners that you don’t need to watch 100 times over the course of one summer to notice.

But in spite of this, on repeated viewing, the story of Deckard becoming human, becoming human through the act of hunting these replicants, is deeply resonant. Before, Deckard is living in the Waste Land. The life inauthentically led. At the end, he’s a human being again. That’s something the replicants gave him; something Roy Batty gave him.

Roger Ebert, in his review, said you would probably not like this movie, but your toaster would love it. He felt it lacked emotion. Given how overwhelming the visuals are, how utterly different the world Scott and his team created is from anything Ebert or anyone else had seen before, it’s easy to understand how he failed to see the human story here. Failed to notice the brilliant acting on the part of Rutger Hauer, Brion James, and Darryl Hannah, playing creatures who are at once impossibly strong and capable physically and at the same time emotional children, exploring the world for the first time, fearing for their own mortality, not understanding it.

Those elements are there, however, and once you’ve let the visuals sink in, once you start taking them for granted, you can see the human story in here. Watch Pris try and lure J.F. Sebastian in. She’s being manipulative, but in a very crude manner. She’s not entirely comfortable with her role as a “pleasure model” and hasn’t figured out how people work yet. She’s not sure her plan to meet him and get him to trust her will work and when it begins to fail and her attempts to keep the conversation going led nowhere, she resorts to instinct. “I’m hungry, J.F.” she says, and I think she’s being honest.

Honesty works, and Sebastian leads her in to his hideaway.

Watch Leon in Chu’s Eyeball Palace, or whatever it was called. Putting his hand into the freezing cryoliquid, pulling it out and smelling it. He’s exploring, experiencing, curious. He’s not an unfeeling, unthinking killing machine.

Finally, watch Batty kill his creator. The fear and pain and terror flashing across his face as he does so. And then watch him ride the elevator down afterward, thinking about what he’s just done, and then thinking about thinking about it as his face contorts into a frown. Not a lot of actors can do that, and not a lot of stories call for it.

While watching the features on the DVD I was struck by something. Something that reminded me of a conversation with a friend at work who just read Watchmen. The future Blade Runner presents isn’t supposed to be appealing. It’s supposed to look run down, full of trash. It’s meant to be bleak and, for many reviewers, that’s exactly what it was. It’s a dystopian vision of the future, maybe the distopian future in film. Yet, in spite of this, I fell in love with it. It seems like if you were an adult when it came out, this vision of the future was bleak. But if you were a kid, it was exciting. I had much the same reaction to Rorschach in Watchmen.

When I read Watchmen at 15, I thought Rorschach was awesome. He was uncompromising, an iconoclast. But, I discovered reading the book again in college and again afterwards, you’re not supposed to like him. He’s a sociopath. It’s interesting to me that what Moore and Scott were doing transmitted one message to the adults watching, and a completely different one to us kids.

Phillip K. Dick didn’t like what Scott did to the replicants, the way Scott described them to Dick, he made them sound in all ways superior to human beings. But Dick didn’t live to see the film. I think if he had, he’d have realized he was wrong. In both the book and the movie, Deckard is an automaton, going through the motions, unthinking, unfeeling. In the movie, the replicants–while not human–are experiencing life the way a human being does, the way a human being should, the way Deckard does not. Until the end when Roy dies. I think that’s exactly what Dick wanted.

For years afterward, Blade Runner made it’s way into everything I wrote, in one way or another. Movies and Video Games were passions of mine even as a small person, but in both cases I never really understood that these were things you could do for a living. I didn’t think people made these, they just appeared. Whereas with writing, I knew I wanted to be a writer when I was seven. There was something about words on a page I knew I could master. I recognized that I had something akin to skill that could be developed. I ended up in Video Games, but watching other directors and cinematographers who are my age going on about Blade Runner exactly as I have here makes me realize that, had things been only a little different, I’d be in that business instead of this one. Until 1992, and the advent of the Workprint, I thought Blade Runner was something only I got. There was no internet, I thought everyone else had overlooked this movie. I was wrong. There’s an entire generation of people exactly like me with exactly the same experiences. It was the discovery of the Workprint that made this clear.

Blade Runner, Phase 2: 1992-2007

Back in the day, before the Intarwebs, there were, like, newspapers and shit and it was reading the L.A. Times that I learned about the Workprint of Blade Runner.

Nuart TheatreSome friends of mine and I drove up to L.A. to watch it at the Nuart. The Nuart is a classic place to see art films and the fact that Blade Runner in any capacity was playing here meant that something special was happening. When I saw the temp opening credits and heard the temp score, I felt like I was part of movie history. The theater was packed full of college students like me and people from the industry who wanted to see the original print of the movie that influenced a generation.

It was an amazing experience. It was, to someone who had memorized the original, radically different, almost every scene had something different in it. Bryant describing Leon as a loader on intergalactic freighter, “the only way to hurt him, is to kill him.” Rachael whispers “Deckard” to him in the elevator causing him to spin and whip out his gun. Lots of little differences.

In June of that year, Kenneth Turan, film critic for the L.A. Times, wrote a great article about the history of the film called Blade Runner II in which he agreed with all those who felt the film was better without the voice over, but added “Face it, the only reason we can appreciate this version is because we’ve all seen the version with the voice over and know what’s going on.”

At the time, this was not called “The Workprint” it was called “The Director’s Cut” and was, to my certain knowledge, the first time we’d heard that term.

Scott eventually came out and said “No, that’s not my cut of the film, that’s the workprint. THIS is my original cut of the film…” and the Director’s Cut was released in theaters. I got to see it in 70mm at a theater in Long Beach and while the experience was astonishing…possibly no movie, including Lawrence of Arabia, needs to be seen on the big screen more…this actual version of the movie wasn’t that different from the theatrical release. Sure, there was no voice-over, there was no happy ending, and there was the Unicorn Sequence, but apart from that, it was essentially the same. Nothing like as radical a departure as the Workprint.

When I got a DVD player in 1997, this and the Fifth Element were the first movies I bought. As with Laser Disc before it, Blade Runner was the movie people used to take the new digital format for a spin. Put it through it’s paces. See how much better it could look than video tape. It was the Dark Side of the Moon of digital video players.

Blade Runner, Phase 3: 2007 – Present

I learned about the 5-disc edition of the film somewhere around 2001, when it was originally timed to come out to mark the 20th anniversary of the original. But problems securing the rights prevented its release. In the meantime, we got a pretty good documentary from the BBC: On The Edge of Blade Runner.

Finally, the 5 disc “Ultimate Edition” came out, and something was restored to me which had been long lost. The original theatrical release of the film.

Mead S Until this edition came out, the film was dead to me. I couldn’t watch the Director’s cut. It was too sterile, bleak, uncompromising. It’s amazing, don’t get me wrong, but it’s not my Blade Runner. I haven’t had a VCR in years, and I yearned to watch my Blade Runner again, and now I can.

This package is as comprehensive a document of a film as you’re ever likely to see. I’ve dug into it for about 10 hours and still haven’t exhausted all of its content. One thing we get here is Harrison Ford talking about the movie for the first time.

I’d long come to grips with the fact that in no interview, in no career retrospective, would Ford discuss this movie. I didn’t know precisely why, but obviously it was something he wanted to forget about. I was delighted to learn that he was involved in this version, though, and he speaks very charitably about the film. This is a guy who’s not afraid to call someone on their shit, as he does in the documentaries included with Star Wars. Here, he speaks with working with Scott, Scott speaks about working with him, and all the actors talk about working with both. I feel as though if you watch the special features and read between the lines, you get a pretty clear picture of why Ridley Scott and Harrison Ford didn’t get along.

Edward James Olmos (“Eddie!” lol!) and Darryl Hannah and Rutger Hauer all did a lot of actorly stuff, they fleshed out their characters and brought ideas to Ridley. Ridley seems to respond well to this. Even some pretty goofy stuff that Hauer wanted to try, Ridley would go with it. The actors, and Ridley, speak very positively about this experience. Scott seems to get genuinely excited when actors come to him with ideas. “Ridley, what do you think of this?”

Whereas Ford would go to Ridley and ask “So who is this guy I’m playing?” Ford wanted Scott to engage with him, tell him who Deckard was, give him direction. Ridley’s reaction to this seems to be “This is what I pay you for. You’re an actor, you figure it out. I have a movie to make.”

It’s difficult, looking at the depth and breadth of Scott’s vision, to disagree with him. This is not an intimate character drama, this is little more than the creation, whole cloth, of an entirely new world, never before seen on screen.

Ford has long been saddled with the accusation that he hated the idea of the voiceover, and so deliberately did a bad job so as to sabotage it. This is a story propagated by Katherine Haber, the production executive.

Listening to Ford tell the story, and listening to Scott talk about it, it’s clear to me this is not the case. Ford is a professional and did his best, but the writing of the narration was tortured and this, I believe, is what’s coming through Ford’s performance.

There’s a great moment where the production designer is watching one of his mans go to Scott with two different coffee cups and ask the director which cup should be used in the scene with Leon and Holden. And Scott’s reply is “these both suck, get some more.”

The guy with the cups was pissed. What was wrong with THESE cups, if these weren’t good, which ones SHOULD he get? The Production Designer saw this and went to his mans and said “Listen dude, this isn’t how Ridley works. Go get A HUNDRED cups. What do you care? It’s not your money, go buy a shitton of cups and let Ridley pick the one he wants.”

Ridley took a lot of takes and at one point in the documentary included in this edition, Dangerous Days, we see several, like 12 takes of a close-up of a hand depositing a bowl of rice and shrimp on the table. 12 takes of a 3 second shot. At that point, it’s clear he’s sending a message to the money men breathing down his neck. “Look what I can do if you piss me off.”

http://www.squaremans.com/images/vklogo.jpgWithin the features of this edition, we get to see all the stuff they created for the movie, much of which we only catch glimpses of in the film. All that detail from months of work. The magazine covers they invented, the parking meters, everything. It’s breathtaking.

[Left, a great logo for the Voight-Kampf machine, along with a catchy slogan.]

It’s also a lot of fun to see the screentests for the actors they didn’t use for Rachael and Pris. The Rachael actress was, it seems to me, totally wrong for the part. Sean Young really was impossibly beautiful, looking like nothing less than an woman created to be beautiful. But the woman they tried out for Pris is really interesting. I was immediately attracted to her and engaged with her brief performance but pretty quickly I saw how Darryl Hannah was better for the part. She played Pris as a very simple and direct character, almost childlike.

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We get to see those bits of Roy’s speech at the end which they filmed, but cut out. “Reproduction, sex, love. The simple things. But no way to satisfy them. To be homesick with nowhere to go. Lots of little oversights.” When he says that last line, he’s got such a unique look of amused and compassionate melancholy on his face. We never hear him talk about his fears of death, about his life, to anyone in the movie except Deckard. When he dies, before he dies, he pours everything into Deckard. When you see the original speech in the script, it’s clear why it had to be cut down, but seeing some of this stuff they filmed but didn’t include makes me wonder if maybe they should have left it in.

All the deleted scenes, a lot of the unused narration, and even an alternate opening title we’ve never seen, are all compiled and cut together making a 30 minute alternate version of Blade Runner that’s simply fascinating. The unused narration is sufficiently awful to warrant cutting it. Great to hear though.

One great delight of this edition is getting to watch other directors talk about the movie, people like Guillermo Del Toro and Frank Darabont. I have to agree with Del Toro; the voice over is part of my Blade Runner. I like the voice over. Yes, Darabont is correct, the great crescendo reached in Batty’s death on the rooftop is diminished by Ford saying “maybe he loved life more than anything else. His life, my life.” Yes, that’s a needless statement of what we just saw. We got it, we didn’t need anyone to explain it. But I feel it’s almost worth it for the shot of Deckard in slow motion, the rain pouring down his face, and the statement; “All I could do was sit there and watch him die.”

Because I think that sentence shows us Deckard completing his journey. Before that, he was in the Waste Land, living the life inauthentically led. But Batty’s death awakens him to the reality of his own humanity. And it’s not ham-fisted, he doesn’t say “I realized that he was more human than I ever was” or anything like that. It’s up to us to realize that “All I could do was sit there and watch him die” means “I realized that he was more human than me and now that I realize that I find myself wanting to save him, and powerless to do so.” Darabont passionately argues that the voice over ruins everything, but I disagree. I think the part he hates in that sequence, the artless, literal statement about Roy loving life, is the groundwork for the line that gives the entire movie meaning. “All I could do was sit there and watch him die.”

One ongoing debate which Scott seems very interested in ending is the “is Deckard a replicant” issue. I believe that through watching Scott talking about it now, and then, and listening to the comments on the DVD from people close to him, that the truth can be ferreted out.

Darabont says “No! Deckard CAN’T be a replicant!” Because, of course, it would utterly destroy the emotional throughline of the film. And in this I believe he is correct. But he wasn’t involved in production. He’s just a fan, in this regard.

Scott says “I don’t know what I could do to make it more clear. If it isn’t obvious to you that Deckard is a replicant, you’re a moron.”

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Mmm. I’m not sure it’s as clear as Scott would like it to be. I think, based on the stuff the people around him said, about what HE said during production, that Scott had no intention to make it clear that Deckard was a replicant. Scott’s goal was to raise the question. That’s what’s important. Keeping the audience off-guard. By raising the question, you create that Phillip K. Dick moment of getting the audience or the character to wonder “is EVERYTHING I know false?” That’s what so much of our SF in film in the last 30 years is based on. After the fact, 25 years later, Scott is very certain Deckard is a replicant, but I think he’s just interested in winning an argument. One of the scenes cut from the film shows Deckard and Rachael flying off into the sunset and talking. Which we never saw.

Rachael asks if the two of them are now lovers. Deckard explains that yes, they are. She says this is the happiest she’s ever been. Then she ominously says;

“You know what I think?” She asks, looking at the scenery flying by.

Deckard waits for the answer.

She turns to him and says, with no sense of romanticism in her voice; “I think you and I were made for each other.”

In another situation, this would be a romantic sentiment. But Deckard shoots her a look and realization dawns on his face.

Why was this cut? Why not use it? It’s a good scene, and necessary if Deckard is a replicant. I believe Scott cut it because he knew it answered a question he knew should NOT be answered. He knew the goal was to raise the question.

At least, he knew it 25 years ago. I think he got frustrated that, back then, no one thought to ask if Deckard was a replicant and now he’s gone over to the other side. Forgotten the point he was trying to make 20 years ago. Raising the question of Deckard as Replicant is more important than answering it. Keeping the audience off-guard. What is real?

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One thing people underestimate is the impact of Vangelis’ music on the positive reception by the fans of the film. The people involved in the features here go to great lengths to credit him. “You know, Hampton,” David Peoples says, after Hampton Fancher talks about all the emotion and longing in the love scene with Deckard and Rachael being in the music, “a good writer doesn’t need the music.” Fancher, without missing a beat, says “Yeah, but good movies do.” I think Vangelis is almost as important to what makes Blade Runner, Blade Runner, as Ridley is.

It’s been 20+ years since Blade Runner came out and inspired at least two generations of filmmaker. One thing that often disappoints me when I see a movie that’s clearly inspired by Blade Runner…like Renaissance or The Matrix, is that so many people steal the visuals and the ideas, but leave the human story sitting there. Without that, without the emotional resonance of the doomed replicants and Deckard’s journey to humanization on the rooftop, without Rachael’s confusion and longing, none of us would have watched this film over and over again. It’s what makes this film meaningful beyond just the pretty pictures. It has weaknesses, but you cannot rightly accuse it of lacking emotion and human drama.

It’s too bad I can’t say it’s flawless…but then again, what is?

End Of Line

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    6 Responses to “Blade Runner”

    1. Marius Marius Says:

      Man, I’ve got to get me that 5-disc edition.In the neighbourhood where I lived during the late 80′s and most of the 90′s there was only a single cinema (called Park Bio) and it never showed new films, only reprises of old ones. And they had a few films that they’d show again and again, like every night for a week every other month. The two I remember being showed most frequently were The Good, The Bad and The Ugly and Blade Runner. It would be the same people (including my friends and me) who’d come to see these movies again and again every time they were shown. The copies were old and worn and the sound would often disappear for long stretches during which the audience would simply speak all the lines out loud since everyone knew them all by heart anyway. You’d have an entire cinema full of people shouting "Vatch her as she takes ze pleasure from ze zerpent zat vonce corrupted man!"Now, I want to get the DVD, get together with my friends and watch it and occasionally turn down the sound so we can speak the lines ourselves. :)

    2. JakeLeg JakeLeg Says:

      "…Blade Runner came out in 1982. Same year as E.T.. Same year as Tron, Wrath of Khan, Poltergeist, The Thing, The Dark Crystal, Sword & the Sorcerer. Something important was happening in SF in 1982, but that’s a subject for another post."

      I can’t wait Matt!

      It’s "gone", MacReady.

    3. Brian888 Says:

      One of the things I like most about Blade Runner, I think, is how it really demonstrates that good art direction just doesn’t age, even when specific F/X shots start looking bad years down the road.  To viewers today, the flying car shots can look off.  The overall strength of the design and art direction, though, overwhelms such nitpickings.  

      Forbidden Planet benefits from that same kind of strength; the shots of the underground Krell machinery are STILL fantastic to this day.  Hell, Metropolis has the same thing going for it, and that movie is 81 years old.  Time will always be kind to these movies.   

    4. Matthew Matthew Says:

      You are right, Brian Multi Ochos and I think I will mention one of those other movies in an upcoming blogpost.

    5. gchandler gchandler Says:

      Great one Matt. I personally have only seen Blade Runner 3-4 times, but your article has inspired me to watch it a few more.

      The 105 overpass, much like the 2 South is one of my favorite views of LA. In highschool, nothing satisfied me more blasting down the freeway at night to Manhattan Beach then returning, simply to enjoy the city views at night.
    6. zevsvoice Says:

      There is no denying that the incomparable Ridley Scott is a genius at producing entire worlds from scratch.  Being a Han Solo fan as a kid, I was so excited to see Harrison Ford in another movie other than Star Wars.  Boy, was I surprised to find him in that world!  It sure wasn’t Star Wars! 
      Admittedly, it was hard to accept.  But, as the movie went on,  I understood  it and learned to love it as one of my favorite movies.  I appreciated the music of Vangelis also because at that time, I was a "synthesizer" player (we’re talking the 80′s here) in a New Wave band.
      As I got older, I became more aware of the message(s) behind the movie.  Indeed, you can sit a watch it and interpret this film from within different parameters of several philosophies.  Then you get to a point where ya say "AW fuck it– it’s just a great movie!" and enjoy it as such.
      It also amazes me that this movie still influences other art directors and set designers ( I thought THE FIFTH ELEMENT was a happier rendition of the Blade Runner world…and if you notice, there were a few actors from Blade Runner in there).
      Japan Anime’/Manga was highly influenced by this movie too!
      I’m sure the fact that Scott comes from an Art background (he worked in several films within the Art department before shooting to the top as a director), added to his ability to produce a vision that he could communicate to his crews.  He’s a brilliant director who is never afraid to experiment.
      The world could use more directors like him.

      Now if you’ll excuse me, I have a few Replicants to catch!

      Great work Matt.

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