So ... Blade Runner

Cafe Society
1

Since I’ve been calling myself a science fiction fan for 30 years, I thought it was high time I finally watched Blade Runner. So I rented the Director’s Cut version (the only version on the shelf) and watched it tonight.

I … don’t get it.

Since this is supposed to be a “classic”, I assume I’m missing something. According to the back of the case:

In other words, quite a bit different from the original theatrical release. Regarding the last bit, did they mean to write “replicant” rather than “humanoid”? Because looking at Deckard, I see a bilaterally symmetrical figure with two arms, two legs, a head on top, and everything apparently in the normal anatomical position for a human. In other words, “humanoid”. No “might be” about it. In any case, I’m afraid I don’t get what the unicorn had to do with it.

If the “romance” is explored in “greater detail” in this version, I’ll have to assume that the original version didn’t explore it at all, because I didn’t see any actual “romance” being “explored” here, either, beyond Deckard apparently forcing his attentions on Rachael in a brief kissy-face scene.

What was up with Edward James Olmos and his origami?

Realizing that this was released in 1982, I merely chuckled at the antique computers. But what was up with the flying blimps carrying animated billboards (giant pop up ads! with sound!) and shining spotlights into everybody’s windows? (heh Check out my new rocket launcher. I named it “Adblocker”.) What’s the official explanation for the nonstop rain? I was sure the setting must be Seattle, until I looked at the box again and saw it was supposed to be … Los Angeles? Why were the skyscrapers belching fire at the beginning?

I don’t really see this as a “science fiction” film. I see a morality play that happens to be set in the near future. And I still don’t get it.

Help a fellow out here.

2

Read this:

http://rogerebert.suntimes.com/apps/pbcs.dll/article?AID=%2F20071103%2FREVIEWS08%2F71103001%2F1023

3

I think it’s a film of its time. That it’s been imitated by, and has inspired imagery in, so many other films and music videos since, that we miss what captured people’s imagination in 1982.

I personally didn’t like it when I first saw it back in what would’ve been 1984 or so, and having re-watched it again recently with the Final Cut release, still don’t like it.

Like you, I think I must be missing the point of it, because it just left me indifferent.

4

I haven’t seen it in years, but I’ll give some of it a stab:

The other blade runner leaves unicorn origami and Harrison Ford dreams of unicorns. This would seem to suggest that the other blade runner knows the content of Ford’s dreams. This could mean that Ford’s dreams are actually factory installed dreams like the memories that Rachel has of the spiders.

The rain: the world is dystopian, the environment is permanently screwed and now it rains (probably acid rain) all the time in LA.

The blimps: I thought they were some kind of mass transit system with advertising on the sides.

And yeah, the mean replicant, not humanoid on the blurb.

5

The movie is all about grey actions and grey morality. If a character seems good, he’ll do something bad to bring it back, and if he’s done something bad, he’ll do something good.

The first time I saw the movie, I didn’t like it as there didn’t seem to be any goal in the story. Then I saw it again and have ever since loved it. There isn’t a real beginning, middle, and end to the story–it’s trying to get you to empathize with all the characters who’ve been placed in this dystopian machine to be ground down. Once you stop watching it for the story and instead just for the characters and their lives, you love the movie.

6

I love the look and mood of the movie. The story is almost a maguffin - an excuse to pull you into that world and to focus on the big questions about life, love and happiness. Deckerd’s emerging empathy (and love) for replicants even while he is learning more about his own nature (which differs in the different cuts - I won’t spoil things here) - that’s the central theme to my mind…

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It was an astonishingly different take on the future when it first appeared, and virtually created the entire cyberpunk dystopian future look. (Cinefantastique had a big feature on it when it was released, printing a lot of the little details that you don’t get to see in the film. Like the magazine covers, with their cover prices of about $12. We’re almost there). The movie had a 1930s film-noirish atmosphere, yet was set in the future. Like those 30s films, the main character is tough and the morality murky.
The title was catchy yet borrowed – Alan E Nourse used that title for a wholly different science fiction novel (which is pretty good, yet overlooked. It’s worth a read). Apparently William S. Burroughs made up some sort of screen treatment for this that sold as a separate book (I’ve never seen it, and I’ll bet it was never seriously meant to be filmed). Ridley Scott apparently saw it, or it was brought to his attention, and he liked the title and used it. You can see an acknowledgment to Nourse and Burroughs in the closing credits. The term “Bladerunner” meant someoone who supplied bootleg surgical equipment (scalpel + blade. get it?) for clandestine medical work in Nourse’s novel. It doesn’t really mean anything in the film, except an arbitrarily applied meaning.
The movie is nominally based on Philip K. Dick’s “Do Andriods Dream of Electronic Sheep?” I don’t understand Hollywood’s love of Philip K. Dick. They buy his properties and then completely change them around. The book is almost totally different from the film. Don’t go reading it to seek enlightenment about anything in the movie.

As originally released, there’s not a whole heckuva lot to suggest that Deckard is a replicant. I still have a hard time believing that this was intended from the beginning. I didn’t hear a word about this until many, many years later. Certainly there was no discussion of this — absolutely zero – in any contemporary reviews, interviews, or in the fantastic film press. It’s not suggested by Dick’s book. Scott did not, at the time, say to anyone who wrote anything down that “people weren’t properly understanding my film” (By the way – the idea of people responsible for controlling androids being unhappy with the idea of their becoming too human, the androids trying to become more human, and the protagonist discovering at the end that he was himself a later version of such an android had been used in the underappreciated 1962 film Creation of the Humanoids. I wonder if Scott saw it, and was influenced by it.)

It’s a good film, but there’s a lot that left me unhappy about it. I did hate Harrison Ford’s monotonous narration. Someone claimed that Ford didn’t want to do it, and did that monotone on purpose so that they’d cut it. But I don’t know if there’s any truth in that storey. Certainly it’s a better film without it. The happy ending wasn’t at all convincing to me, and the filmn works better without it.

The Unicorn thing does suggest the Deckard-as-Replicant thing, since the Olmos haracter folds that origami unicorn at the end (and how would he know, unless Deckard told him about the dream?), but, as mentioned, it wasn’t in the original release. It still doesn’t prove it, though. Scott gets these weird images in his mind that he seems to feel he HAS to work into movies, regardless of why. He was definitely on a unicorn kick at the time, since shortly afterwards he used unicorns as the central theme in Legend. Another visual he used was The Villain At The Climax Hanging On By His Fingernails (Legend, again, and Alien) and The Hero In The Dark At Night Being Surround By Japanese Kids On Bicycles (Bladerunner and Black Rain.)

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I’ve never understood this. Why is the happy ending unconvincing?

Right now I’m in a medium sized city and I can drive 30 minutes in any direction and feel like I’m in the middle of nowhere. I would have to drive almost 45 minutes after I get to the middle of nowhere to even approach a suburb-sized city.

The idea that the entire world would be covered by a neverending city is absurd. Even a future that (in 1982) was almost 40 years away.

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I’m one of the few that prefers the original film. I liked the voice over. It’s a tool that tied in nicely with it’s film noir style. I also didn’t have the problem with the “happy ending”. As Justin pointed out, there has to be some green areas some where, even in 2020.

10

Neither have I. It’s as though chopping the happy ending and leaving no ending at all was somehow better. Not only is the original ending perfectly supported by the earlier events in the movie (the other replicants have a 4-year lifespan because it’s around that time they begin forming their own emotional responses - Rachel has emotional responses as a built-in feature, thus no need for the shortened lifespan), it’s directly foreshadowed (“What if I went away, went North? Would you come after me?”)

It’s always seemed to me that viewers who like the changes want the movie to be darker, rather than better.

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I don’t think the problem with the original ending was that there was still green space - as other posters have noted, that’s perfectly plausible. The problem is that these aren’t characters who should have happy endings. Deckard, human or replicant, is a monster - in fact, I prefer to believe he’s a human because a human character who does the horrible things Deckard’s job requires is far more interesting than a machine purpose-built to the task. Deckard isn’t in love with Rachel - he’s obsessed with her, scares and intimidates her badly.

Blade Runner is a movie about bad people doing bad things, for all sorts of different reasons. Tyrell is greedy, the police chief some sort of pig, Deckard is so broken he can’t even make a moral choice any more, and the replicants are desperate beyond endurance. This doesn’t make even the Replicants - the most sympathetic characters - into “good guys”. They’re cruel, sadistic, manipulative. But when you take all these broken people, and put them in a broken world, you get a damn fine movie - so long as there’s no hope for any of them. Letting a Blade Runner character be happy betrays a movie which is, ultimately, about how our own greed, apathy, and lack of empathy could betray us all.

Deep, eh? :smiley:

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I saw the theatrical version in its original run.
I saw the director’s cut when it was in the theaters.

I like the director’s cut better. But without the voice-over narration of the theatrical version, I don’t think I would have understood the director’s cut. (Of course, Ridley Scott doesn’t think I understand it now. I think it makes more sense if Decker is human. :stuck_out_tongue: And I really don’t care whether Rachel’s lifespan is 4 years or open-ended. The important ending is the confrontation between Decker and Roy.)

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I’m another who prefers the original film. To me, the film is not science-fiction, even though it’s set in the future–it’s a hard-boiled detective story that just happens to be set in the future. The voiceover helps set the “film noir” mood for this kind of story.

As for the happy ending, it never bothered me. IMHO, the film really ends when Deckard and Roy are on the rooftop. Roy’s speech ends the film, as far as I’m concerned, and we find out just how human his manufacturers have made him. After that, it doesn’t matter what happens–the look on Deckard’s face tells us that he understands, and that’s all that matters.

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The visuals clearly invented the cyberpunk look and genre. The story, though, isn’t all that good (I don’t think Dick’s novel was much better), and the “hint” of the unicorn is too vague to suggest a thing if you don’t read what Riddley Scott has said about it. He makes an origami unicorn – so what? How does that conclusively show Dekard is a replicant (a suggestion made explicity in the book, BTW, and also explicitly denied – the denial being one of the book’s flaws)?

And even with that revelation, the film still doesn’t make a heck of a lot of sense.

The better comment on the problems with the film were in Slate. The movie is visually impressive, but story and character are completely uninteresting. The bright shiny lights make people actually think there’s something there.

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That makes sense. I’ve seen Dark City and Running Man, and understood them just fine.

So he’s sort of dropping clues for Deckard’s benefit because he can’t, for whatever reason, come right out and tell him?

Ah, that didn’t occur to me. Having been a public transit user for many years, I’m accustomed to buses that you have to wait and wait for and are never there when you want them, while the blimps in the movie seemed to always be right there outside whatever building Deckard happened to be in, shining their spotlights through the windows whether you wanted them or not. I suspect Ridley Scott simply wanted a lot of flashing, sweeping lights, and that was the main purpose for the blimps. :wink:

I think that was part of my problem with it - the apparent lack of an honest-to-goodness story. I’ve always been much more of a reader than a film watcher (I’m watching a bunch of movies this month out of desperation, though, because it’s my job’s slow season and I’m going stir crazy sitting around the house). I like a clear beginning-middle-end story.

Agreed.

Speaking of which, I never quite figured out why a police department with flying cars sticks its chief in an office straight out of 1947.

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I absolutely loved it when it was first released. I was attending film classes at the local U and we were all gaga raving about and trying to analyze it. It must have been 15 years since I last saw the flick, so forgive me if I’m hazy about some details. Also, rather than address specifics post and points, I’ll write how I feel and felt about it.

  1. The voice over: The movie doesn’t work without it. It’s not a film noir, maybe not even an hommage. I think it’s more of a what if…?, which makes it pure SF. The *what if…? * here being What if film noir had never existed, but will be invented 40 years from now? Scott also made a movie which, within its own reality, is not SF, but is made as a contemporary detective story, filmed in 2020. So he doesn’t explain anything, becuase the audience in 2020 will get all the details. To have all this work, on different meta levels, the voice over is essential, since Deckard says one thing and does another on the screen.

  2. Like all film noir, it’s about broken men and dangerous women. True film noir couldn’t have existed without WWII. Despite the heroic welcome the GI’s got on their coming home, a lot of them were broken, morally bankrupt. I believe it was glossed over at the time, but I recall reading somewhere that Hells Angels essentially got started by ex soldiers who couldn’t adjust to civilian life, much as the (in)famous outlaws of the old west was a result of the Civil War - hogs or horses, same difference.
    Deckard is morally corrupt and broken. His job is being a hitman and if you think about - how long could you stay sane if your job was to go out and kill beings that actually are humans, except for how they came to this world.
    To make this work, Deckard must be human. If he isn’t, it’s just automata killing each other and then there are no moral choices to make.
    Deckard has hit bottom, he knows it, and I think the main theme is his failing attempt at redemption. By saving one replicant, he hopes to somehow make up for the autrocities he’s commited. The so called happy ending is therefore also necessary, since it, in combination with the voice over, show how deluded he really is.

  3. This is the part I’m hazy about, but I recall some strong Christ imagery about Roy. The nail through the hand and doves are quite obvious. Roy was also the product of an immaculate conception, so to speak, and he was a leader of a small, but growing band of rebels, questioning the established truth, trying to make choices that are moral to them, if not the world around them. Roy ends up a martyr, killed by the established rulers and ultimately, Deckard is not Judas, but the soldier in John 19:34* who gorges the already dead Jesus.

Finally, Scott has spent a lot of time retconning this movie. Why is that such a bad thing when Lucas does it, but is hailed when Scott does the same?

*I could’ve sworn the soldier was named, but a brief search of online Bibles didn’t turn up anything.

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The recently released ‘Final Cut’ version of the film, which I just viewed a couple of nights ago. is more or less the Director’s Cut version with a few slightly extended scense and some digital tweaks to remove glaring continutiy errors. I’ve seen the film at least five times in three of its various versions and it remains one of my all-time favorite films. I prefore the versions without narration myself.

Practically speaking, a lot of the production decisions in the films were made purely for appearance’ sake. The director has said straight out that the choice or near-permanant night and rain was made to hide the fact that the sets (Warner’s backlot city street dressed with futuristic fittings) simply didn’t look very good in daylight. Same for some of the interior sets, such as LA’s famous Bradbury building (where JF Sebastian lived) and the police station set (LA’s art-deco Union Station being more evocative of 1947 than 2019 – that ws done because a. they’re beautiful, and b. they evoke the film-noir senssibilities of the film.

Re; the blimps, you’re right, as far as it goes, but they are a bit more than set dressing. They are an advertising medium, not transport. They are there to remind the audience that off-world is now the place to be, that only the poor and losers remain behind on earth, and to remind all the ‘little people’ who can’t afford to get off-world that they are nothing more sales targets for the corporations that wield the real power.

I’ve got to say that in movies I much prefer stories that are told obliquely rather than beginning-middle-end.

Nevertheless, there is plenty of story fhere, concerning genetically engineered beings that have been created to do society’s dirty work but are treated as non-entities and basically executed whenever they show signs of wanting to throw off their slave status, of these same beings trying to find their humanity (one of them literally meeting his maker), an assassin who finds his targets just a bit too human to be comfortable with bumping them off, and a (admittedly rather tepid) love story between the assassin and one of these beings, who, if she happens to want to throw off her own particular yoke, simply becomes another target.

If we’re going to attack the logic of the movie btw, there are certainly plenty of poiints to do so. I’d suggest starting with the fact that Deckard, despite having apparently made a career out of chasing down replicants, seems to know next to nothing about them at the start of the film.

It does seem for some people that the story is less than compelling. Fair enough, I probably cannot convince you otherwise. Me, regardless of story, I respect if for the striking visual design and incredible depth of detail that managed to (in my view) create a convincing view of an alternative world.

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I forgot to add this in my OP: Now I know where the heavy metal band, Disturbed, got the line “Wake up, time to die!” in the song “Droppin’ Plates” from their debut album.

Your comments make a lot of sense. As to your final question, I think the issue is that an overwhelming number of us Star Wars fans were children in 1977 when we saw SW in the theater (I was 11). So we saw the movie in our very formative years, and SW is a primary reason many of us became sci-fi fans in the first place. Seeing that movie was a defining experience for us. Lucas coming around decades later and changing it is like your mother waiting until you’re 40 to tell you that your recently deceased father, with whom you were very close, wasn’t really your father.

But Blade Runner, being an R-rated movie, was seen in theaters by a mostly over-17 audience. By 17, most people have lost much of that sense of wonder they had as a grade-schooler, and so a movie isn’t going to have the same kind of impact on them. But, they’re old enough to say, “I didn’t understand that”. Later, through various social influences, they can start to wonder, “Maybe it’s just me.” Group-think starts to take over, and people begin to think the movie was great because “everybody else” thinks so, instead of making an independent judgment.

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Phase42 writes:

> But Blade Runner, being an R-rated movie, was seen in theaters by a mostly
> over-17 audience. By 17, most people have lost much of that sense of wonder
> they had as a grade-schooler, and so a movie isn’t going to have the same kind
> of impact on them. But, they’re old enough to say, “I didn’t understand that”.
> Later, through various social influences, they can start to wonder, “Maybe it’s
> just me.” Group-think starts to take over, and people begin to think the movie
> was great because “everybody else” thinks so, instead of making an
> independent judgment.
Blade Runner did poorly in North American theaters. It did better in other countries. It got mixed reviews from film critics. It took a while before it became to be considered a cult classic.

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If Deckard is a replicant, designed to kill replicants, why can all the other replicants kick his ass? Why doesn’t he have replicant strength?

If Deckard is a replicant, designed to kill replicants, why not just tell him?