Blade Runner Redux

Ultimate cliff-hanger -- Picture courtesy of Warner Bros.

by blogSpotter
Once in a while a movie comes along that becomes a cultural touchstone and a benchmark. Such movies will be endlessly dissected and offered for comparison. If you’re a movie buff like me, and have failed to see one of these movies, you feel left out of the conversation. The movie of which I now speak is Blade Runner, a 1982 sci-fi thriller that broke the ground in several respects.

Director Ridley Scott says the film is his greatest achievement, and he has to be right. I watched it for the first time this weekend on my Apple TV. I saw the 1992 director’s cut that’s been digitally remastered. With only minor anachronisms (an Atari ad, low-res digital prints), the movie could’ve been made yesterday.

Blade Runner is set in Los Angeles of 2019, and deals with a small uprising of human-looking extraplanetary slave robots (replicants) who’ve returned to Earth. They hope to be reprogrammed to experience full human emotions and extend their lifespans beyond 4 years; they also want to take over the humans who made them. Harrison Ford plays Rick Deckerd, a special detective (“blade runner”) hired to “retire” (i.e. kill) the uprising replicants. I won’t elaborate much further in case a reader wants to see this movie.

What makes this movie a ground-breaker? The film is considered the first in the “neo-noire” category which blends the eerie, sepia-toned ambience of 1940’s film noire with a grim, industrial future. Much of the film is cast in tones of brown, black and blue – steam comes from building vents while rain falls lightly on the pavement. There are garish flashes of color when the camera pans over a futuristic Chinatown, where bubble cars float past fish markets and all-you-can-eat buffets. There are odd overlays of future and past (a 1959 Chrysler Imperial drives by) which adds to all the weirdness.

There are at least 3 movies (or movie franchises) that owe a huge debt to Blade Runner for both style and content:

o The Matrix – this movie deals with machine uprisings in a quasi-apocalyptic future
o The entire Batman series starting with the 1989 movie – the Gotham city envisioned by Burton has to have been influenced by Blade Runner.
o Blue Velvet – I thought that David Lynch’s vision of a superhuman (or inhuman), psycho killer lurching through an abandoned apartment building was novel in 1986; it was done to perfection by Rutger Hauer in Blade Runner. You say, “other movies before that had psycho chase scenes”. Well, not quite like this.

In watching this movie, I was spell-bound by everything, not the least of which is the eerie background music. Also this movie has a highly charged erotic moment where Deckerd tells Rachael, a replicant, to say “kiss me”. She says, “I’m not programmed to say that”. He insists, and the replicant finally does as commanded. Apparently something overcomes her replicant status (overpowering love? New circuitry?). It was pointed out earlier that Rachael was a “newer model” that featured realistic memories and emotions – apparently so.

In sum, Blade Runner is an outstanding movie. The American Film Institute named it the 97th greatest movie of all time. Rent the 2007 remastered edition and find out why.

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