Ridley Scott (1982)[1]

The future described in Blade Runner is now so close that it’s hard to resist assessing the accuracy of its predictions of life in Los Angeles in 2019.  Although it’s hardly a major feature of the dystopia that Ridley Scott describes, one quite funny inaccuracy is that people are still smoking in the workplace.  Watching Blade Runner with Her (2013) pretty fresh in the mind also creates a resonance between Scott’s ethnically hybrid megalopolis and Spike Jonze’s Los Angeles ‘in the near future’ – particularly the Oriental aspects of both locales (even if the East Asian elements of Jonze’s LA were largely the result of shooting parts of Her in Shanghai).   Blade Runner, adapted by Hampton Fancher and David Peoples from Philip K Dick’s 1968 novel Do Androids Dream of Electric Sheep?, is undoubtedly an impressive vision – or, at least, a feat of design that’s not only technically remarkable but also atmospherically compelling.  The production designer Lawrence G Paull, the cameraman Jordan Cronenweth and Douglas Trumbull’s visual effects team help Scott to meld his apprehension of the future – in which giant corporations rule our depleted, degenerated planet and beyond – with aspects of urban rot that were already part of the reality of big-city life in the capitalist world of the early 1980s.  There’s also a blending with film noir tropes:  Blade Runner takes place in spectacularly mean streets, in continuous rain and, mostly, in darkness – or air-polluted lightlessness, anyway.

The kinship of Harrison Ford’s Rick Deckard with private eye progenitors is amusing for a while and the world that Deckard inhabits looks so extraordinary that it gives a funny twist to a very familiar plot mechanism:  a seasoned pro is brought out of retirement to deal with just one more case.  In the aftermath of nuclear war and consequent radioactive poisoning, there has been mass emigration to ‘off-world’ colonies in space.  The Tyrell Corporation has created androids to serve human beings in the colonies but these bioengineered entities sometimes come illegally to Earth and the job of ‘Blade Runners’ like Deckard is to track down and destroy them.  Blade Runner is the story of Deckard’s quest to identify and eliminate four such ‘replicants’ – Tyrell Corporation ‘Nexus-6’ models.  Harrison Ford is in every respect the right man for the job.  Although Rick Deckard is a gloomy fellow, Ford, at this stage of his career anyway, had just about insuperable audience rapport.  The longer Blade Runner goes on, however, the more the shamus set-up contradicts the apocalyptic scale of the visuals and the powerfully oppressive atmosphere generated by them.  It’s interesting that Ridley Scott removed Deckard’s private-eye-style voiceover, which featured in the original Blade Runner, from the ‘final cut’ version but the discrepancy between the two kinds of movie that this is remains.  The prevailing mood of the film suggests that what’s left of civilisation is at stake but that’s not reflected in what happens:  Deckard’s hunt for the replicants really does seem to be just one more case.  Blade Runner is absorbing thanks to its surface rather than its substance and Ridley Scott himself seems to have become preoccupied with the ingenious production of non-humans.  The automata, which the lonely Sebastian (William Sanderson), a designer who works with the Tyrell Corporation, has created to fill his apartment and emotionally empty life, seize and hold your attention but they have no plot purpose – they’re merely an intriguing part of the set decoration.  This big film tells rather a small story.   You’re especially conscious of that in the protracted, gruesomely violent finale (during which the electro-sledgehammer score by Vangelis becomes harder than ever to tolerate).

Blade Runner‘s standing as a sci-fi classic is based partly on the view that it explores seriously the profound question of what it means to be human.  For me, this didn’t go deeper than the interesting but less profound matter of casting – and the human reality, or otherwise, of the actors involved.  The ending of Blade Runner is famously ambiguous[2] and there’s a school of thought that Deckard is himself a replicant.  The idea of that is startling largely because of Harrison Ford’s screen persona:  he has a particular aptitude for being ‘our’ representative in an alien world, whether a galaxy far, far away or Amish country or science-fictional Los Angeles.  The four Nexus-6 replicants – named Roy Batty, Leon, Zhora and Pris – are played by Rutger Hauer, Brion James, Joanna Cassidy and Daryl Hannah respectively.  With his white-blonde hair and incredibly blue eyes, Hauer looks the part and is a memorable image but Roy Batty is meant to develop a tragic, as-if-human status and Hauer’s showy, hollow acting undermines what’s intended.  (The Nexus-6 model has a built-in lifespan of only four years and Roy demands that the big boss Tyrell (Joe Turkel) prolong his existence.)  Brion James’s ordinariness has the opposite effect.  In an unnerving episode at the start of the film, Deckard watches a video recording of another Blade Runner testing Leon’s emotional responses to check whether or not he’s android; when his interrogator asks Leon about his mother, Leon shoots him dead.  Joanna Cassidy’s Zhora, a strapping stripper with a snake, and Daryl Hannah, who shows a lot of wit as the punky Pris, are more plausible people (you’re shocked when Deckard kills them) than Sean Young’s Rachael – Tyrell’s assistant, whom Deckard falls for.  Rachael has the hairdo of a 1940s Hollywood femme fatale.  Sean Young’s blank face and expressionless voice hardly add up to a concomitant quality of mystery and danger but I guess they do help sustain the question of whether Rachael is human or replicant.

14 April 2015

[1]  This note refers to Blade Runner: The Final Cut, first released in 2007.

[2] At the time of the film’s original release, the uncertain outcome must have pointed towards a sequel but this hasn’t yet materialised.  According to Wikipedia, a follow-up, with a different but as yet unconfirmed director, is now due to begin production in mid-2016:  perhaps it will be released in 2019, to mark the arrival in real time of the year of its predecessor.