Blade Runner (1982) Directed by Ridley Scott. Screenplay by Hampton Fancher and David Peoples based on the novel Do Androids Dream of Electric Sheep? by Philip K. Dick. Starring Harrison Ford, Rutger Hauer, Sean Young, Daryl Hannah, and Edward James Olmos.
We never really watch the same movie twice. We’re always changing, and the world is always changing, so it’s never quite the same experience, not even when the rewatches happen in quick succession, like back in 2003 when I went to see Return of the King five times in about ten days at a movie theater that always smelled like weed in a small Colorado mountain town. But it’s even more true when we watch something several times over years or decades, coming back to it at different points in our lives.
Many of the films we’ve watched so far in this series are ones I’ve never seen—and if I have, I’ve seen them maybe once or twice. Blade Runner isn’t like that. I’ve seen this movie many, many times. I love it. It has always been one of my favorites and has always shaped what I love and crave in science fiction stories.
One of the things I love most about it, and appreciate anew every time I watch, is something I think we almost take for granted after having the film around in the sci fi world for more than forty years. But it’s an aspect that is in many ways still pretty rare in sci fi films, and that’s how incredibly, effectively immersive the worldbuilding is.
But I’ll get to that in a moment. We’re back in the 1980s, exactly the same cultural, political, and historical context as we had with Tron, because Blade Runner came out in the same year and was made by people working in the same Hollywood, watching many of the same movies, reading much of the same literature. And, yes, a lot of people who worked on Tron also worked on Blade Runner.
Philip K. Dick’s novel Do Androids Dream of Electric Sheep? was published in 1968, and several people had been interested in adapting it for screen over the years. But nobody got very far. This was before Hollywood got into the habit of adapting a Dick novel to screen every few years—a trend kickstarted by Blade Runner, which was released a few months after the author’s death in 1982. The only work of his that was adapted and released during his lifetime is a short story called “The Imposter,” which was included on a British television series called Out of This World in 1962. (That same story was later made into a movie as well: Gary Fleder’s widely-panned Impostor, in 2002.)
When producer Michael Deeley convinced Ridley Scott to take on Blade Runner, Scott had exactly two feature films on his resume. The first was The Duellists (1977), a critically acclaimed historical saga set during the Napoleonic Wars. The second was Alien (1979). Alien had received mixed reviews from critics (the critical consensus has since changed significantly, but that’s a topic for another day), but audiences loved it, so Scott was a good choice to take on another sci fi project during this time when sci fi was all the rage. Scott had just left Raffaella De Laurentiis’ production of Dune (1984) due to how slowly the film was coming along. (The production would turn instead to David Lynch, who turned down a chance to direct Return of the Jedi (1983) to rewrite the screenplay for Dune and direct his own version of the film. The history of the major sci fi films of the late ’70s and early ’80s requires a flow chart of intersecting lines to understand.)
Early in its development, the film was called things like Android and Dangerous Days. But those titles—this is, I promise, the real reason—just weren’t cool enough. The title Blade Runner actually comes from a 1979 William S. Burroughs film treatment called Blade Runner (a movie), which was based on a 1974 sci fi novel called The Bladerunner by Alan E. Nourse. The novel isn’t about androids; it’s about people who smuggle black market medical services in a society where medical care is controlled by eugenics legislation. Scriptwriter Hampton Fancher happened to have a copy of Burroughs’ (apparently bonkers and unfilmable) film treatment lying around and liked the name. Scott approached Boroughs to buy the rights to the title, and the movie formerly known as Android or Dangerous Days became Blade Runner.
The fact that the name “blade runner” makes complete sense for black market medical smugglers but makes absolutely fuck-all sense—and is never explained—for people who hunt humanoid androids was totally beside the point, because they were right: it really does sound so much cooler than Dangerous Days.
There is a ton of information out there about Blade Runner’s production story, but most of it is pretty standard Hollywood fare. The director and lead actor didn’t get along, everybody hated filming at night in the rain, a test audience’s negative reaction to a preview version of the film resulted in investor demands that led to changes that nobody really liked, including that much-hated voiceover narration tacked onto the theatrical release but removed as soon as Scott got a chance to do his own cut.
To be honest, the plot is pretty standard Hollywood fare as well, because Blade Runner is, like last week’s Alphaville, a result of the natural evolution of noir films in a world that keeps meeting and surpassing the style’s defining cynicism. The world-weary tough guy, the mysterious and beautiful woman, the rich man responsible for terrible things, the uncaring and stratified city, the endless nighttime scenes, the ambiguously open ending, the wonderful, jazzy, moody electronic score by Vangelis—this is all very deliberately drawn from the film noir tradition.
That was a major stumbling block for the people funding the movie. When preview audiences reacted poorly and Scott tried to defend his film’s tone, they didn’t get it. This was the beginning of the ’80s. The experimentation of the ’60s and bleakness of the ’70s in cinema were out of style. Mainstream science fiction, as the American movie business understood it, was now defined by the grandeur of Stanley Kubrick’s 2001: A Space Odyssey (1968), the optimism of Steven Spielberg’s Close Encounters of the Third Kind (1977), or the epic excitement of George Lucas’ Star Wars (1977).
Blade Runner drops us into Los Angeles in the year 2019. Which, at the time of the film’s release, was thirty-seven years in the future. Text at the film’s opening explains the key science fictional concept needed to understand the future the film is exploring: a powerful corporation has created replicants, bioengineered androids who are largely indistinguishable from humans and used for slave labor in off-world colonies.
The fact that the film specifically uses the words “slave labor” defines the premise very clearly. It’s telling us, before any characters even appear on screen, that while people in the movie will refer to replicants as less than human, the story itself is not asking whether they are persons or machines. It’s beginning with the answer: they are people. The question that follows is, “So what are we going to do about it?”
We learn that several replicants have violently rebelled and escaped from an off-world colony. They have made their way to Earth, and four of them are on the loose somewhere in Los Angeles. One of them, a man named Leon (Brion James), is briefly detained, but escapes by killing the man testing him to determine whether he is a replicant. So the Tyrell Corporation—the company that created the replicants—and the cops call in a specialist to track them down. That specialist is Rick Deckard (Harrison Ford), who in very classic noir antihero fashion does not want to be dragged out of a depressing retirement and back into the unpleasant work of replicant hunting, but ends up doing it anyway.
Deckard learns that the latest version of replicants have a built-in expiration date that lets them live only four years. This is supposed to prevent them from being able to form complex emotions and relationships, which would lead to them becoming disobedient. And, once again, the film is telling us that what the characters are saying is not what the film itself is saying. There is an entire enforcement system designed around dealing with disobedient replicants, complete with complex testing technology and police protocols. The rationale about keeping replicants unemotional and passive is bullshit that everybody knows is bullshit. The economy of slave labor is built knowing and expecting that the enslaved people will try to escape it.
Eldon Tyrell (Joe Turkel), the inventor of the replicants, asks Deckard to test his replicant-identifying techniques on Rachael (Sean Young), Tyrell’s assistant. That’s how Deckard learns about a new technological advancement: replicants can now have implanted memories so that they don’t know they are replicants. The revelation that she’s a replicant naturally sends Rachael into an existential crisis—and it does the same to Deckard, after a fashion, but that doesn’t stop him from trying to track down the four fugitives.
The replicants have come back to Earth because they want something from the Tyrell Corporation. They want to know how they can prolong their lives beyond that four-year kill switch that looms in their futures. This leads them to look for the people who created them: first the eyeball guy (played by James Hong), who sends Leon and fellow replicant Roy Batty (Rutger Hauer) to genetic engineer J.F. Sebastian (William Sanderson).
Another member of their fugitive group, Pris (Daryl Hannah), befriends Sebastian to gain his trust. I just want to say that Hannah is so very good in this role. Her Pris sits right at the edge of the uncanny valley, her every word and motion carrying an oddness that is amplified perfectly when she is among Sebastian’s unsettling collection of dolls and puppets. Best of all, her awareness of the irony of that situation shows through in moments of banked, simmering rage.
Meanwhile, Deckard finds the fourth replicant, Zhora (Joanna Cassidy), working at a nightclub and kills her after a chase through the city streets. (Zhora says her snake isn’t a real snake in the movie, but on set he was not only a real snake, but he was Cassidy’s pet snake. His name was Darling, which, I think we can all agree, is the perfect name for a Burmese python.) Right after that, Leon finds Deckard and attacks him, but Rachael and her truly magnificent full-length fur coat show up to save the day.
Roy and Pris convince Sebastian to take Roy to meet Tyrell, but Tyrell claims that he doesn’t actually know how to let the replicants live longer. Roy kills both Tyrell and Sebastian—his creators—before the final showdown with Deckard at the gloriously creepy puppet-filled building that was Sebastian’s home.
Every scene in that location makes excellent use of the Bradbury Building in downtown Los Angeles, which is transformed into a neglected and rotting version of its future self. It feels wrong to call this long climactic sequence a “fight,” because Roy always has the upper hand; in structure it’s much more akin to a bleak, violent haunted house chase scene. Which is to be expected, coming from the director who had just released Alien, an entire movie that is a bleak, violent science fictional haunted house chase scene. (I mean that in the best possible way. Alien is another of my very favorite movies of all time. This film club will definitely watch it in the future.)
The confrontation ends, of course, with Roy Batty’s death in one of the most famous scenes in all of sci fi cinema. I could go on forever about Hauer’s performance in this film, but other people have done it already, so I’ll just agree, yes, it really is that good.
The very end of the movie is one part that famously suffered from the interference of dissatisfied investors while the film was being made. The men with the money wanted a happy ending. So in the theatrical release, Deckard and Rachael are shown driving off into some wilderness to a presumed happily-ever-after. (Scott acquired the wilderness backdrop by calling up Stanley Kubrick and asking for leftover footage from The Shining (1980).) It’s such patently ridiculous meddling, because the ending that Scott wanted, with the unicorn origami and the elevator door closing, is tonally perfect in its ambiguity and unwillingness to offer the audience any reassurances. That is, thankfully, the ending the film has in both the Director’s Cut and the Final Cut.
There is now a way to describe the genre that results when you cross near-future technological sci fi with the dark tone and crime-fiction trappings of neo-noir. But the word “cyberpunk” didn’t exist until the early ’80s, when it was invented by sci fi author Bruce Bethke and used as the title of a short story published in Amazing Stories. But of course, the kind of stories that are now called cyberpunk have roots much deeper than that—roots that go all the way back to the same place as our old friend German Expressionism and our very human, and very justified, anxieties about technological progress, political unrest, and social inequality. Those themes were all over the sci fi literature emerging after World War II, especially when sci fi mingled with the same trends that were pushing at art forms all across the board: a desire for experimentation, exploration of perception and subjectivity, challenging of genres and conventions, and critiques of political and social issues.
But literature and film are different art forms, and a science fiction movie needs a visual language. And Blade Runner’s visual language is truly exquisite. Scott has spoken a lot over the years about the many different inspirations that went into creating the style, mood, and atmosphere of Blade Runner.
Among those inspirations was American artist Edward Hopper’s very famous painting Nighthawks, which is one of those images that is so widespread in pop culture, and has been mimicked and parodied and interpreted in so many ways, that it’s easy to overlook the fact that it’s also an incredible piece of art. Hopper’s work as a whole tends to focus small, quiet, seemingly insignificant moments in the lives of ordinary people, with a casual realism that leaves a great deal up to interpretation.
Other inspirations included cartoonist and sci fi/fantasy artist Jean Giraud, better known as Moebius, who did design work on Tron and was offered a chance to work on Blade Runner but passed it up, and the designs of Italian architect Antonio Sant’Elia, who didn’t actually work on many buildings but whose sketches of never-built futurist structures very strongly influenced the look of Metropolis. And Metropolis is, in turn, one of the greatest visual influences on Blade Runner, to the point where there are scenes from Blade Runner where the shots of the miniatures that make up the cityscape are lined up using stills from Metropolis as a guide. That massive pyramid that is the Tyrell Corporations headquarters is very much intended to have the same dominating, inescapable feel as the Tower of Babel in Metropolis.
And, last but definitely not least, there are the inspirations that come from the real world, specifically from industrial northern England where Scott grew up, and from the densely-populated cities of Asia, particularly Hong Kong. Entire dissertations can be (and no doubt have been) written about how the aesthetics of various Asian cities are used as visual shorthand for science fictional futurism in film, and the many sociological implications and cultural assumptions that entails. Blade Runner is definitely not the only reason for its popularity (William Gibson’s novel Neuromancer and Mamoru Oshii’s 1995 film Ghost in the Shell deserve equal credit/blame), but the film’s street-level portrayal of this urban environment has had an indelible effect on how sci fiction visualizes near-future cities.
Which brings us to the special effects themselves, because visualizing is one thing, but making it feel real is something else entirely. A lot of what we see in Blade Runner is very real, in the form of miniatures and models. The head concept artist was Syd Mead, who had previously worked on Star Trek: The Motion Picture (1979) and was the largely responsible for the visual look of Tron’s computer world. Douglas Trumbull and Richard Yuricich were the special effects supervisors—they had also worked together on Close Encounters of the Third Kind (1977) and Star Trek: The Motion Picture (1979)—and the guy in charge of building the models and miniatures was Mark Stetson, whose work you have seen in literally everything.
And what cool miniatures they are! There is a great article at VFX Voice with pictures and descriptions, but you know I love this stuff and am going to tell you all about it. The scene at the opening of the film, as the camera pans slowly over the cityscape, features those tall, flaming towers, which are silhouette cut-outs, and the sprawling city illuminated by thousands of tiny lightbulbs. There were so many lights the setup required miles of fiber optic cable and had to be continually cooled by fans to be usable. The city itself, when we see it more closely, is a hodgepodge of every structure and shape the designers and model buildings could imagine, which helps give it the look of a layered city constantly dying and rebuilding. The Tyrell Corporation pyramid was a clear plastic structure with thousands of tiny windows allowing light to shine from within. The huge advertising billboards we see on the blimp and the buildings are simply trays from a children’s game that have been painted black and silver.
All of this was filmed using multiple passes with motion-controlled cameras, so they could create the appearance of soaring over and through the city at different heights and different angles, with the many visual layers perfectly matched.
It looks so good. It all looks incredible! And, yes, I know that complaining about computer effects replacing practical effects in films is hardly a unique position to take these days, but learning more about practical special effects through research for this column has turned me into a raging zealot when it comes to practical effects. I genuinely believe we will lose something precious and irreplaceable if we let this kind of craftsmanship and artistry die off.
On the ground level, the visual realism is created largely through a combination of matte paintings and making the actors really uncomfortable. The background of the final rooftop scene with Deckard and Roy, for example, is a matte painting, as are many of the street-level views of the city and the background of the interior scenes in Tyrell’s office. The paintings were done by Matthew Yuricich (brother of Richard), the same artist who did the beautiful matte paintings in Forbidden Planet (1956). As for making the actors uncomfortable, well, they were always in the rain, they were surrounded by smoke, and it was always night, which is great for creating a mood but also means that, by all accounts, absolutely nobody in the cast or crew had a good timing filming.
Here’s the thing about creating effective worldbuilding: an interesting sci fi premise and great visuals aren’t the only necessities required for a film to achieve that. There are plenty of other things a film can do when it wants to not only tell a story, but also provide us with enough context and information that we can imagine the world that exists beyond the edge of the screen and outside the lives of the characters. It’s in those things that I think Blade Runner is really, truly among the very best.
So many of those elements in the movie stem from the fact that it is a very grounded, street-level view of this city, both physically and metaphorically. We spend very little time in Tyrell’s grand pyramid, and when we do visit, we’re there with an outsider. We know only as much about how this world functions on a high level to know that there are corporations and cops, and the latter serve at the beck and call of the former. We don’t know where or how replicants are made, but we know where to get noodles on a rainy night. We don’t know what kind of government this world has, but we know that the city has its own creole language (developed by Edward James Olmos himself for the few lines his character speaks). We don’t know how the bioengineering science works, but we know there is a night market where we can buy an engineered pet. We don’t know what has happened in the world to bring about this version of Los Angeles, but we know that it’s both overcrowded and desperately lonely, both glittering and decaying, both familiar and strange, and the kind of city where a man might find surrounding himself with puppets and dolls an easier way to have friends than going out into the noisy, crowded streets.
And there’s that blimp, that advertising blimp that’s always there. You can be having the worst day of your life, forced to confront unwelcome truths about yourself and the world you live in, with the brutal violence you both perpetuate and endure brought into sharp relief, and floating lazily over it all is that fucking blimp, up there deploying crass commercial orientalism to sell the dream of better lives.
All of this together creates a deeply intimate form of science fictional worldbuilding, with the right information to know what a worn-down person going about their life might think and feel, and texture enough to make it convincing.
Author Bruce Sterling once described cyberpunk as a combination of “lowlife and high tech,” a description that has stuck because it really is the easiest way to get at the heart of a certain type of story. “High tech” can mean any number of things, an infinite number of fascinating premises for sci fi stories; for me that aspect is just about tweaking reality in interesting ways. When it comes to really feeling a story, what my noir-loving heart craves most is the “lowlife.” I love when sci fi takes from the noir tradition that perspective of looking at the world from the bottom up, rather than the top down, to explore broken societies full of desperate people just trying to get through to the next day. And that’s the reason I never get tired of Blade Runner.
What do you think about Blade Runner and its rainy, grim 2019 Los Angeles? Or it’s impact on sci fi in general, and sci fi cinema in specific? Are you also a champion of practical effects? (I do realize I wrote this entire article without ever once addressing the question of whether Deckard is a replicant yay/nay? thing, but I just don’t think it matters that much. Feel free to discuss that in comments if you want—I know it is a beloved topic of conversation among sci fi fans.)
Next week: Katsuhiro Otomo’s Akira (1988) will be our first animated film! It also takes place in 2019, a year I have come to believe was imaginary all along. Watch it on Hulu, Crunchyroll, Amazon, or Vudu.
