— RANKING: 7 —
SCI-FI/NOIR: The carefully designed poster art of this initially misunderstood masterpiece. Blade Runner introduced an entire subgenre, fusing the dystopian future elements of traditional science fiction with elements from the pulp-cinema film noirs of the late 1940s. Courtesy: Ladd Company/Warner Bros.
CREDITS
Warner Bros./Ladd Company; Ridley Scott, dir.; Philip K. Dick, novel; Hampton Fancher, David Webb Peoples, scr.; Scott, Fancher, Michael Deeley, Charles de Lauzirika (2007 final cut), pro.; Vangelis, mus.; Jordan Cronenweth, cin.; Marsha Nakashima, Terry Rawlings, ed.; Lawrence G. Paull, Syd Mead, prod. design; David L. Snyder, art dir.; Michael Kaplan, Charles Knode, costumes; Greg Curtis, Logan Frazee, Terry D. Frazee, Ken Estes, Donald Myers, Robert Cole, Scott Forbes, F/X; Michael Backauskas, Robert D. Bailey, Robert Hall, John C. Wash, Tim Angulo (2007 final cut), visual/optical effects; 118 min. (original cut), 117 min. (2007 final cut); Color; 2.20:1.
CAST
Harrison Ford (Rick Deckard); Rutger Hauer (Roy Batty); Sean Young (Rachael); Edward James Olmos (Gaff); M. Emmet Walsh (Bryant); Daryl Hannah (Pris); William Sanderson (J. F. Sebastian); Brion James (Kowalski); Joe Turkel (Tyrell); Joanna Cassidy (Zhora); James Hong (Hannibal Chew); Morgan Paull (Holden); Kevin Thompson (Bear); John Edward Allen (Kaiser); Hy Pyke (Taffey).
All he’d wanted were the same answers the rest of us want—“Where did I come from?” “Where am I going?”
DECKARD, ON WITNESSING A DEATH
BACKGROUND
Philip Kindred Dick (1928–1982) was born in Chicago and moved with his parents to San Francisco. During those early years and throughout his adult life, Dick was haunted by the death of his twin sister, Jane, shortly after their birth. Following his parents’ divorce, Dick lived with his mother in Washington, D.C., and Berkeley, California. There, at age twelve, he happened upon the pulp magazine Stirring Science Stories, and determined to make a living writing just such fiction.
Dick’s groundbreaking approach was to create intensely realistic characters, then place them in an impossibly absurd alternative cosmos. Many consider his 1968 Do Androids Dream of Electric Sheep? to be his crowning achievement. In that novel, the source for Blade Runner, Dick channeled his drug addiction and hallucinatory experiences into an artistic triumph. The antihero’s obsession with the mystery woman reflects Dick’s own undying obsession with his long-lost “invisible twin.” Deckard’s attempt to determine whether his inamorata is android or human represents a reflection on Dick’s own questionable origins. It also stirred what would soon become one of the key themes of most sci-fi to follow, as well as one of the formative precepts of post-modernism: perception is reality. We can never know anything for certain, only our own individual mental conception of anything “out there.”
THE PLOT
In 2019 Los Angeles, Deckard serves as a Blade Runner, a government-backed assassin of a breed called replicants, human-like androids developed to serve as droid slaves in far colonies. Any replicants that illegally return and attempt to pass themselves off as people must be “retired.” For some time, Deckard has wanted out; he has come to believe that perhaps these creatures may have a point in their insistence on full integration into society. This makes Deckard’s final hit all the more difficult: Rachael, a beautiful advanced form of replicant who believes herself to be human. So . . . like the lead in a 1940s film noir who meets a deliciously duplicitous dame, our antihero Deckard must decide: should he kiss or kill her?
Unlike so many great contemporary sci-fi filmmakers, Ridley Scott did not grow up adoring 1950s junk genre films. Among his favorite movies are Citizen Kane (Orson Welles, 1941), Seven Samurai (Akira Kurosawa, 1954), and Lawrence of Arabia (David Lean, 1962). In interviews, Scott has cited Stanley Kubrick as an enormous influence, not only for 2001 but also the costume film Barry Lyndon (1975). Scott apparently drew his aesthetic for his 1977 film The Duellists from the cool, aloof, purposefully distanced Barry Lyndon, which treats a highly emotional human story in a clinically intellectual manner. For Scott, like Kubrick, any appeal (or lack thereof for some viewers) is based on a creative incongruity between subject matter and personal style. Though Alien made Scott a huge favorite among genre fans, he agreed to do Blade Runner only if he could deemphasize the expected conventions, offering instead a futuristic film noir.
Scott did not have final cut. The original release print, featuring a heavy-handed voice-over by Harrison Ford, disappointed mainstream viewers and sci-fi buffs alike. Word soon spread that there was another, greater film, lost on the cutting room floor, and fans were eager to see Scott’s complete version. The 2007 cut, considered by buffs to be the final word on the subject, has been cited as a genre masterpiece, some aficionados insisting it may well rank as the greatest sci-fi film of all time.
THEME
Though thankfully there are no didactic speeches that might have brought this piece down to the level of a message movie, Blade Runner is at heart an existential film about the very nature of what it means to be human. Deckard qualifies as a unique, well-wrought, multi-dimensional character. Also, though, he serves the function of an Everyman: a relatively ordinary face in the crowd who, owing to events, experiences his first thoughts about moral issues. This causes him to question not only what he does but, since his work defines him, also who he actually is. The ambiguousness of the conclusion—is he human, replicant, or a combination of the two?—may confound general viewers. Yet, it is the basis of what those who appreciate the genre at its most complex and demanding love best about Blade Runner.
TRIVIA
One disappointing aspect of the theatrical release was that a dance number featuring the replicant stripper Zhora had apparently been cut, presumably for reasons of time. That this scene was not restored in the final cut struck many as odd, since the dance is essential in driving Deckard’s repulsion-attraction to this seductive android. According to Joanna Cassidy, the sequence was never actually filmed. She had accepted the relatively small role owing to her interest in revealing her terpsichorean gifts, choreographing and rehearsing the erotic performance. At the last minute, Cassidy was informed that there simply was not enough money and/or time to shoot the number, leaving it the one missing scene that can never be restored.