If anything, the current movie-watching audience demands more empty spectacle, including bullet-time, wire-fighting, hyperkinetic superhero battles, etc. Heck, compare any Pine-era Star Trek film to any Shatner-era Star Trek film. The former are almost assaultive in their busyness.
Wait, Rutger Hauer wasn’t the protagonist? But I was rooting for him!
I just rewatched Blade Runner, part of my watching every major robot movie ever made for my robot book. To my surprise I liked it better than I did originally. I had even written an academic article on it, tearing it apart. People are right in saying that the story is bad. And the original had the studio-mandated narration to explain [del]all[/del] a small fraction of the stuff that made no sense.
The Final Cut, approved by Ridley Scott, has no narration, which immediately adds a star. Seeing it in Blue-Ray on a 55" OLED screen made the street scenes pop rather than retreat into murk. They hurt the actual story (why the hell did Zhora, a military assassin, become a stripper if they were trying to infiltrate Tyrell?) but they impart the humanity the rest of the movie totally lacks.
If you want bad bad, go back and reread the novel. The movie made it famous, so it’s hard to remember how utterly ignored it was for its first two decades. It’s a mess. My mind had repressed the middle third, in which Deckard gets picked up by a false police blade runner squad set up by a replicant, headquartered just a few blocks away from the real police. It’s been in operation for years and has human staff, yet nobody has ever noticed the duplication. How many replicants are there illegally on earth anyway? If the fake police are never allowed to kill a replicant, wouldn’t they been wondering why there are special squads for this? If they do, would would the android chief okay it? Why does Dick make a huge deal out of Deckard’s killing six replicants in a day when its the fake guy who kills two once he learns about his boss? I know, you should never ask why in a Dick novel.
Scott took little more than the concept from the novel, so the only thing you miss if you haven’t read it is that almost every animal in the world, including insects, has been killed by radiation. That’s why the empathy test is all about animals. (Some real animals are alive, so if humans can live on Earth the animals should be coming back all over the place if 92% of the humans have gone offworld and if they aren’t who’s pollinating the plants, but again, the novel is insanely stupid.)
I fell asleep after 15 minutes. McClane spent way too much time trying to negotiate with that Alan Rickman character before he finally decided to blow everything up and throw him off the skyscraper.
yeah - and what the fuck are bearabonds anyway?
Isn’t he a sports guy?
Doesn’t the narration (heh) mention in passing that Zhora’s employment as a dancer was the group’s financial support, and with her “retirement”, the survivors were likely to become more desperate?
Of course, narration or no, why Deckard affects a goofy cartoon voice when interviewing Zhora (or what the point of the interview was, really - it didn’t seem a likely line of conversation to determine if she was a replicant or not) remains a mystery.
Saw it when it came out and came away feeling that after so much hype, there wasn’t a whole lot of substance to it. Yeah, it looked great, used the Bradbury Building and Harrison Ford got the shit beaten out of him repeatedly; and it had some humor and now-iconic lines (“Accelerated decrepitude”; “Gosh, you’ve really got some nice toys here.”, etc.) But it was slow and obvious with a facile finale.
Saw it again a few years later at a revival house. My opinion was unchanged, but when I came out of the theater, someone had slashed my tires. I personally re-titled the film “Tire Slasher.”
A friend of mine attended a screening of a so-called “director’s cut” in which Ridley Scott was not present, but a letter from him was read. The letter referred to parts of the film that did not show up in the print that was screened. I’m not sure there really is a “director’s cut,” just alternative versions marketed as such.
I saw one such version on TV maybe 10-15 years ago. It was sans narration and had some other little changes. It was better than the original release…but just barely. What did strike me was that the VFX still looked great, proving (at least for now) that well-lit models and miniatures look better than CG. Further proof was provided by the sequel, which I found slower, less interesting and virtually humorless compared to the original. The film made extensive use of miniatures, but not all of them were well-lit; indeed, it seemed at times like they were going for a bad CG-look.
Cool vid here - Blade Runner 2049 Used Amazingly Detailed Miniature Sets to Bring Its Cities to Life
Jaws was slow? Wow, I never thought so.
Try 2001 next. You are guaranteed to love it!!
He strikes me as more a Solaris kind of guy.
I hope he can handle Last Year at Marienbad better than I could. It overwhelmed my senses to where I nearly fainted!
I’m not a fan either, although I could appreciate the vision and atmosphere.
But then, I’ve never made it through most of the old noir movies. They just put me to sleep.
If your tastes run to broad absurdist comedy, why did you watch Blade Runner in the first place? Who is forcing you to watch the sequel? Do you need us to call the police?
I don’t remember the narration. Since one of them actually has a job at the Tyrell company it’s not the best explanation, either. And how in the world would Deckard know that? At that point in the movie he knows nothing about Batty and his plans.
The goofy voice seems to be an homage to a scene in The Big Sleep, where Bogart puts on an affected voice to get information in a bookstore. The really funny aspect, watching today, is that Ford’s questions are incredibly pertinent about whether she as a stripper is being sexually harassed.
Of the seven versions, the one marketed as the Final Cut, which came out in 2007, is the only one Scott officially approves of these days. Whether that makes it *the *director’s cut is just semantics after that.
What you call ‘slow’ is atmospheric. Scott’s film takes the time to create a completely immersive cinematic experience in a way few films even bother to do; so many modern ‘science fiction’ films set in a post-apocalyptic, cyberpunk mileau rely upon exposure to this movie to set the tone that it is often difficult to understand how utterly novel this was in 1982. This is a flim literally dripping with mise-en-scène, with everything worn, unkempt, and in decay that as the viewer you can’t help but feel like you are viewing a small slice of life in a vastly more expansive world that is on the brink of collapse, and the retro-futurism has kept it from being dated the way many science fiction films of even later provence have become. (Can anyone watch The Lawnmower Man for more than thirty seconds without wondering why people trying to imagine the future of virtual reality though it would look like it was animated on a Commodore 64?).
The story is not complex, and is not intended to be; it’s a simple mystery, such as it is, which serves as a framework for a meditation on the nature of what is meant by “human” which is such a complex question the film doesn’t even attempt any kind of pat answer to it, instead posing a complex morality that includes memory alteration, euphamistic murder for hire, patricide, rape, and a final act of alturistic compassion for no other reason than that the dying Roy Batty wants to feel what it is not only to take a life but to save one. Scott’s retcon that Deckard is a replicant (even though it makes neither thematic nor practical sense in the film seeing as how Deckard is bested by even the least of the actual Nexus 6 replicants he confronts) is pointless, but the original European theatrical cut (without the narration but with some additional violence and no trite hinting at Deckard being a replicant) is the superior cut.
The sequel, unfortunately, is a bit of a swing and a miss. While it is stylistically comparable to the original, the story makes little sense and the attempt to introduce a new mysterious complication hints at a deeper mystery that it then draws back from. The world of Villeneuve feels curiously unpopulated in comparison to Scott’s crowded streets and overstuffed clubs, to the point that I was thinking it suggested a certain conspiracy that never came to pass. And it just has to be said: Harrison Ford just needs to stop sleep-stumbling through movies and work on his golf game, because he has long since given up on putting in an even adequate performance. Ryan Gosling was great casting (as was the rest) but without a compelling narrative or theme and an overlong running time the film just couldn’t help but lag even with the larger action setpieces compared to the first film.
Fortunately, they ‘fixed’ this problem in subsequent sequels to the point that in the last couple McClane just starts out blowing up things at random even before a clear villain has appeared, like he’s some kind of American Liam Neeson. Unfortunately, “I have a particular set of skills, cocksucker!” doesn’t have the same ring to it as, “Yippie-ki-yay, motherfucker.”
The o.p. should watch Hamlet instead. No, I’m serious, the 2010 BBC production with David Tennant is a riot; it really finds the core of dark and depraved humor in what is all too often viewed as a dour tragedy. The bumbling indecisiveness of young Hamlet, the blind rage of Laertes, the diarrheic loquaciousness of Polonius, the infantile perfidy of Cladius, the sorrow-but-lust of Gertrude, the playful turncoatedness (or ironic guilelessness) of Rosencrantz and Guildenstern, the comedic jousting of Fortinbras; the only truly sympathetic and tragic figure is poor Ophelia, whose suicide drives the unwitting young Dane from faking madness into genuine insane rage.
I had a point when I began this post but it has since disappeared like tears in rain. Time…to die.
Stranger
Truth be told, I didn’t mind the narration (and I was fine with the so-called “happy ending”), or rather that it’s a trivial issue compared to a director’s-cut “fix” that tries to imply Deckard is a replicant (and chops the ending completely, replacing it with nothing), which pretty well ruins the film. Leon had a job at Tyrell Corp, in any case. I assume putting a few bullets in Holden led to a less-than-stellar monthly review.
I’m gonna have to see this movie sooner or later, along with Beat the Devil.
Anybody watching the version with the horrible narration is watching the wrong version. Heck, even Ebert only gave it 3 stars. But the final cut is the one he gave 4 stars and added to his “Great movies” list.
If you like funny movies, watch Brazil (make sure it’s the director’s cut) and let us know what you think.
A feature, not a bug. Same goes for the sequel, which I was utterly enthralled by (and because of that dedication to setting atmosphere and letting us luxuriate in it, is one of the better films of the last decade, IMO)