I can still watch it and tear up at the end: “I’ve seen things you people wouldn’t believe. Attack ships on fire off the shoulder of Orion. I watched C-beams glitter in the dark near the Tannhauser gate. All those moments will be lost in time… like tears in rain… Time to die.”
I don’t think anything in Hauer or Young’s body of work has exceeded this film, I suppose Splash or Fried Green Tomatoes approaches it for Hannah, Battlestar Galactica may exceed it for Olmos because of his small role and of course Indy and Star Wars are arguable for Ford, but both are cartoonish in comparison IMHO. Am I wrong? I mean on a rainy afternoon I’d much rather rewatch Blade Runner than any of the above. “Attack ships on fire,” can you imagine?
No, you’re not wrong. “Splash” is a nice movie, but “Blade Runner” is in several ways a masterpiece. I’ve seen a couple of Rutger Hauer’s post B.R. efforts: the word “dreck” comes to mind.
We share an opinion on Hauer’s work in “Blade Runner” - really a tour de force performance. Because I find Batty’s death scene to be among the loftiest pinnacles of untouchably great acting, I’ve sometimes tried to imagine how some other famous actors might have done with that role, and I’ve decided that I’d like to see Russell Crowe don that particular trenchcoat. Maybe he could equal Hauer’s brief moment of divine inspiration, but I can’t see anyone, living or dead, bettering it.
Several years ago, I saw The Big Sleep, and loved it. The chemistry and the verbal jousting between the characters is fantastic. I couldn’t tell you much about the plot, though. I don’t remember who was guilty, or exactly what they were guilty of. Somehow, the movie thrives on that; as if our confusion mirrors Marlowe’s confusion as he tries to piece it all together.
Looking back on Blade Runner, I remember it very much the same way. I don’t know where each of the clues came from, or how certain characters came to be in certain places. And isn’t there even one replicant left unaccounted for? For those who love the film, is that part of the reason why? Was Scott deliberately trying to channel the unresolved threads of film noir along with its bleak outlook and moral cloudiness?
No, there isn’t one replicant left unaccounted for. Because of sloppiness in the script in the original version of the movie, it sounds (if you listen carefully to the dialogue) like the count of the number of replicants is wrong. This was nothing but sloppiness. It’s been fixed in the Final Cut version of the film.
To me, Hauers best moment wasn’t the death scene, but a single line earlier on. When he first enters Sebastians home and says, “Gosh, You’ve got a lot of neat toys.” You can see that despite all his capabilities and apparent worldliness, he’s really just a four-year-old inside.
I think one of the strengths of Blade Runner is that so many bits are open to multiple readings - and this is one of them. I didn’t think Roy was being sincere with that comment - he’d just read Sebastian, quickly and well, and knew how best to ingratiate himself with the man. He’s playing Sebastian from the moment they meet.
Well, if you don’t like it, you don’t like it. But I think that people who do like it feel that it does a few things very, very well. It creates this very large, well-realized future world, with a very distinct look, and populates it with a host of morally ambiguous charactes who remain deeply sympathetic. Roy Batty is a monster - but he has excellent reason to be one. Deckard is a thug whose job is appalling - and yet, as we see in the film, entirely necessary. (The fact that Olmos’ character knows he dreams about unicorns suggests that Deckard is also a replicant - another bit of nuance and irony for the character).
And the film sticks this characters and this world in a genuinely interesting plot.
