Blade Runner • 1982 • Directed by Ridley Scott
Roy, the Combat Model Repicant: All these moments will be lost… in time… like tears in the rain…
— Rutger Hauer to Harrison Ford in Blade Runner
When Blade Runner was finally released in 1982, after a long, arduous
and grueling production history, marked by equal measures of technical
difficulty and personal turmoil, it met with a decisively lukewarm reception
from a confused and disappointed public. In the wake of Harrison’s Ford’s
sudden rise to stardom in Star Wars
and Raiders of the Lost Ark, adoring
new fans expected to see ‘Indiana’ in another riproaring, uplifting sci-fi
epic. What they got was a dark and dystopian dreamscape of a movie, a violent
futurist nightmare with the heart of a classic private eye noir, and a lot more
on its mind than explosions and derring-do.
Additionally saddled with a lugubrious studio endorsed faux Raymond
Chandler narration (which Ford purposely read in as expressionless a manner as
possible, hoping the studio would drop it) and a mawkish ‘happy’ ending based
on unused footage from, of all things, The
Shining, Blade Runner was doomed
in its initial run. Over the years, a number of different cuts of the film
appeared on tape, laser disc, and in festival showings (a total of seven
discrete versions, according to Paul Sammon’s terrific essay The Seven Faces of Blade Runner),
provoking continued fan interest and debate; and with the release in 1992 of
the Official Director’s Cut, this emotionally charged, visually resplendent
film was, finally, and properly, acknowledged as Ridley Scott’s masterwork, and
quite arguably, the best science fiction film of all time.
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| Ridley Scott's Blade Runner takes place in one of the most breathtaking and convincing created realities in Film... |
Based on the 1968 novel Do Androids Dream of Electric Sheep? by
sci-fi master Philip K. Dick (other Dick-based films run from the superb Minority Report to the execrable Total Recall, but Runner remains the first, and still best, adaptation of Dick’s
work), Blade Runner takes place on a
pollution-racked, rain-soaked and decaying planet Earth, in a time when the
powerful and privileged have long since fled to far flung space colonies to
live a lifestyle maintained and protected by armies of hyper humanized
androids, or ‘replicants’. The latest incarnation of these sophisticated
humanoid creatures, the Nexus 6, as a result of having been given artificial
memories, the better to be controlled, have been inconveniently developing
self-awareness and real emotions; and, like most oppressed beings whose needs
and humanity go unrecognized, have begun a furious and bloody revolt.
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| We're not gonna take it... anymore... |
Called in
to ‘retire’ four replicant escapees, including ‘pleasure model’ Pris (Darryl
Hannah) and the brooding, angst-ridden ‘combat model’ Roy (Rutger Hauer),
old-school retired cop Deckard (Ford, in his finest role) is brought out of
retirement to ply his greatest skill: an almost preternatural ability to hunt
down replicants, whom he stubbornly dismisses as machines. As the violence of
the replicants, (spurred on by a desperate search for a way to evade the
built-in fail-safe of their 4-year lifespan) escalates, Deckard pursues his prey
without pity. But, after doggedly hunting and brutally killing beautiful
‘assassin model’ Zhora (in a thrilling and disturbing chase setpeice drenched
in blood and shattering glass), Deckard is inexplicably stricken with remorse…
Is it due to his losing battle against falling in love with the stunning and
ethereal experimental replicant Rachael (Sean Young), or does Deckard’s hatred
of replicants reflect his own misdirected self loathing, born of a dawning
realization of his own origins…
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| Doomed Love doesn't come any hotter than Sean Young in Blade Runner |
Script, acting and
direction notwithstanding, great science fiction films stand or fall, finally,
on the strength of their artificially rendered ‘authenticity’; and Blade Runner’s thought provoking,
romantic story is mounted in the most believable and awe-inspiring ‘created
world’ ever designed for film; a jaw dropping and unforgettable visual
landscape which stands as the best, most convincing argument against the
current all-pervasive dominance of computer generated imagery, or CGI.
While
CGI can slavishly imitate the surfaces, textures and movements of the real
world, nothing takes the place of a real object in real space captured by a
camera on film. The model-based backdrop envisioned by effects pioneer Douglas
Trumbull and production designer Syd Meade, with its richly imagined detail and
uncanny and seamless melding of actual Los Angeles locations (The Bradbury
Apartments, The Bonaventure Hotel, Union Station and Frank Lloyd Wright’s Ennis
House) with their gorgeously wrought models and the legendary MGM backlot ‘city
street set’, presents this anti-utopian environment with such unimpeachable
realism that our disbelief is successfully and permanently suspended from the
opening frames.
Without the “oh yeah, right…” reaction that generally
accompanies even the most expensive CGI, we are allowed to be swept, without
the distractions of cheap fakery and bombast, into Blade Runner’s difficult, demanding, and arrestingly romantic
story, unimpeded. While the rich, multi-textured and multi-layered score of
Vangelis (unfairly dismissed as the composer of the pedestrian and tediously
over-referenced Chariots of Fire) is
rightly noted for its sweeping swathes of epic synth and late-night noirish
piano themes, it just as often seeps into and interacts with Peter Pennell’s superb
sound design, as tactile visuals, sounds and music combine into the vast
tapestry of rain-soaked metal, stone and glass which is the LA of Blade Runner’s near and melancholy
future.
That other Achilles heel of
much science fiction cinema , the corny, overwrought hammery of bad acting by
cardboard characters, is also conspicuously missing in Blade Runner. The film is blessed with a sparse and tersely
eloquent script, and is packed with canny, colourful performances by such
character notables as M. Emmet Walsh and Edward James Olmos as Deckard’s police
handlers, the great Joanna Cassidy as doomed hitlady/stripper Zhora, Darryll
Hannah as the punkish and deadly Pris, James Hong, hilarious as eye designer
Hannibal Chew, and especially William (Newhart’s
‘my other brother Darryl’) Sanderson in a surprisingly subtle turn as the
replicants’ pathetic co-creator Sebastian. Ford is desperately convincing and
affecting as a seemingly ordinary guy caught up in a most extraordinary
situation; unable to stop his destructive pursuit of Pris and Roy even as its
essential injustice and his own true nature are slowly and surely dawning on
him. The life of the film, however, belongs equally to two actors whose
performances here belie the unfortunate arc of their careers in the 25+ years
since Runner. As Rachael, the soulful
android who clings mournfully to memories that she knows are artificial, Sean
Young is hypnotic and drenched in sadness; vulnerable and irresistible.
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| Are Memories what make us real? Or is it Dreams? And is there a difference? |
And, as
the tortured, anguished Roy, whose demand for justice and recognition as he
rails against the approaching darkness render him more heartrendingly ‘human’
than many of Runner’s actual humans,
Rutger Hauer delivers the performance of a lifetime: majestic, and at once
childlike and terrifying, Hauer compels us to sympathize with, and even root
for, an often repellent character who has, as Roy tells Deckard “done some
questionable things…” As Roy’s frantic search for meaning and affirmation lead
him to a confrontation with his ‘maker’ that evokes myths from Prometheus to
Frankenstein, Hauer’s performance is a wonder of controlled rage and afflicted
pathos; ironically, the elegiac rooftop passing of this supposedly non-human
character is one of the great death scenes in film. While both these actors
have continued to work steadily and
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| … like tears in the rain… |
creditably over the years, Young’s personal
demons, and Hauer’s typecasting as an otherworldly plot device have resulted in
the unfortunate underuse of their considerable talents; one hopes that
career-resurrecting roles still lie in their futures.
It’s too bad she won’t
live… but then again, who does?
— Edward James Olmos to
Harrison Ford in Blade Runner
Complementing its fine
performances and stunning production, and further distinguishing Blade Runner from the competition, is
its unusual and compelling sense of poetry. The thread of tears – Rachael’s
gentle weeping as she is rebuffed by Deckard’s initial rejection of her
‘humanity’, the constant refrain of rainfall, and Roy’s dying ‘tears in the
rain’ metaphor; and the recurring imagery of eyes (traditionally proffered as
the window to the soul) – The extreme close-ups of eyes that open the film, the
iris scans of the ‘Voigt-Kampf test’, Pris’ shamanesque eye makeup, the
artificial owl that glides though the hallways of the Tyrell corporation,
impassively peering at its creators; even the method of Roy’s killing his
creator – all hauntingly suggest the central questions of Blade Runner: What makes up a soul? How do we access that soul?
What makes us ‘human’? And who decides? Key also are the origami figures left
everywhere by the seemingly callous cop Gaff (Olmos), and the fake family
photos to which the replicants cling so dearly (even Deckard’s second victim,
the brutish Leon [Bryon James] is obsessed with retrieving his snapshots). Much
has been made of Blade Runner’s
metaphorical evocations of social ills, from racial and sexual prejudice to the
then nascent AIDS crisis; today, in the wake of our increased awareness of the
tragic dilemma of Alzheimer’s, Runner,
with its central emphasis on the crucial importance of memory in the human
makeup, is newly and poignantly relevant.
In
the age of DVD, ‘Director’s Cut’ has come to be associated with self-serving
assertions of studio interference with the creative vision, accompanied by the
equally self-indulgent addition of bloated, often gratuitous material better
left on the cutting room floor. In the case of Blade Runner however, a few simple but crucial changes (along with
a newly minted print) have rendered perfect an already powerful and nearly
perfect film. The addition of the brief but all-important ‘unicorn’ shot in the
film’s first third, the removal of the silly ‘happy ending’ shot at its
conclusion (the ending actually still remains very cautiously hopeful), and the excision of that hamhandedly
obvious and completely unnecessary narration, have restored Ridley Scott’s
ambitiously thoughtful and completely thrilling meditation on no less than the
nature of consciousness itself, to its highly original and riveting self.
