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.
I have seen this film a few times before, and it definitely holds up very well. I feel the world-building is immaculate, and I love all the neon signage everywhere and the like. I love the ambiguous ending, hinting that Deckard is in fact a replicant. I also love the many symbolic layers to the film, from the chess game between Sebastian and Tyrell to the more obvious unicorn.
I am still doubtful about the whole Deckard being a replicant thing. Yes there is the whole prior memories to give a basis for emotions and all that, but Deckard is a retired hunter with a history with other people including other replicant hunters and police. Faking that is a lot harder than faking memories in isolation. Unless one wants to go into a ‘Truman Show’ / ‘Total Recall’ rabbit hole. Even saying that he came from another jurisdiction that had replicants that had to be hunted still needs more than a paper trail as a history.
Even the faked emotion scheme was not able to be hidden from that Voight-Kampff test successfully. It would have been unlikely that Deckard would have been able to avoid the test as he and his fellows would most likely have been used as a control or ‘police line up filler’ as some point and had to be tested in earnest as part of procedure.
I thought Blade Runner was visually impressive when I first saw it in 1982, and it only became more impressive as its future aesthetic came to take over much of sf cinema. Given our current Sinophobia in the US, I wonder if our movies will adopt a Gulf Emirate aesthetic to signify “future” cityscapes.
And it is only appropriate that a real python is playing a synthetic snake, as the “electric sheep” of the novel title are literal: the only pets affordable, the only nature readily available for most people are replicants, though their synthetic nature is a painful, open secret.
The Asian influences portrayed in Blade Runner were largely Japanese, perhaps building on the perception at the time that Japan was a growing economic and technological power that was likely to become dominant in the future. Though Ridley Scott was mainly inspired by Hong Kong, Syd Mead’s production design drew heavily on 1960s Tokyo, and of course there’s the movie’s iconic image of the geisha on the huge advertising screens. This is reinforced by the two anime productions that have been made in the BR universe, the short film Blade Runner Black Out 2022 and the series Blade Runner: Black Lotus. Indeed, modern Tokyo, particularly Shinjuku, looks even more like Blade Runner than it did in 1982, to the extent that there’s a legend that it inspired the film’s design. (See: https://thegaijinghost.com/blog/omoide-yokocho-tokyo-blade-runner-question )
So I don’t see any reason that Sinophobia would lead to pop culture giving up on Blade Runner-style Asian-influenced futurism. China isn’t the only country in Asia.
That’s an interesting thought about current prejudices/political stances. I’m curious now about how current sci fi depicts future cities, but I’m not sure I’ve noticed any patterns. I’m going to start paying more attention, though!
I think the tendency is still often just to copy Blade Runner. I was struck by how Netflix’s Altered Carbon did exactly that, a modern SF production still slavishly bound to the aesthetics of a 40-year-old sci-fi film. I don’t think people even see it as Asian-influenced anymore — it’s just Blade Runner-influenced.
I consider Blade Runner Ridley Scott’s best film, but I didn’t like it when I saw the original cut with the voiceover. Not only was the narration terribly written and delivered, but it dumbed down the movie. It wasn’t until I saw the version without narration, the one that let me figure things out for myself rather than telling me what to think, that I understood what the story was about Deckard gradually realizing he was fighting for the wrong side. The narration in the theatrical cut totally ruined that by having Deckard say he didn’t know why Batty saved him, reducing it to some random, inexplicable glitch in an Evil Robot rather than a life-changing revelation for Deckard that the replicants had been on the right side all along.
Also, the tacked-on “happy” ending in the theatrical cut doesn’t really make sense. I mean, the world of Blade Runner is implicitly a world that’s in decay, a world that all the wealthy and qualified people are fleeing for outer space. And it’s implicitly a world where nature has been virtually destroyed, which is why real live animals are prohibitively expensive for most people. So dropping in some aerial shot from another movie that’s supposed to be Deckard and Rachael driving through idyllic woodland scenery (in a distinctly non-futuristic car that bears no resemblance to Deckard’s, by the way) seriously undermines the film’s worldbuilding.
Besides, maybe without the “happy ending” there might’ve been more interest in getting the sequel that Scott said in the DVD commentary that he hoped to make. That could’ve been cool, to see a followup with Deckard and Rachael picking up where Batty and his group had left off, trying to find a cure for Rachael’s (and Deckard’s?) planned obsolescence and striking a blow for replicant rights. Although that might’ve been easier if Batty hadn’t killed the experts in the field. (As for the sequel we eventually got, I didn’t much care for it.)
Yeah, the more I read about the reasons the investors forced changes on the theatrical cut, and how deeply unhappy the director and cast were with those changes, the happier I am that Scott got a chance (two chances, really) to go back and do what he wanted to do in the first place. So much of what ended up getting changed are things Scott readily admits he did quickly and disinterestedly because he was so tired of arguing with the money people. And I can’t remember who said it–it may have been Scott or Ford–but somebody involved made the same point about the “happy” ending, asking how there being a wilderness to escape *to* can be consistent with the world we’ve seen.
I’m kind of mixed on the sequel. I thought it was visually splendid, and I also thought it continued to blur the lines between technology and humanity in ways that are even more interesting today than when it came out. However, as a story, I felt it left a lot to be desired.
Here’s a thought: what if Deckard is being gaslighted by the powers that be in believing he might be a replicant?
Given the paranoia that is part and parcel of Philip K. Dick’s work, it’s possible.
And besides, given the nature of what blade runners do, it also serves to keep them in check.
On the whole “Is Deckard a replicant” thing, I think that trying to answer the question is missing the point — which is that it doesn’t matter. The message of the movie is that a person is a person regardless of whether they came from a womb or a lab. That’s the whole reason the question is left ambiguous in Deckard’s case.
“She won’t live. But then again, who does?”
I’ll start by saying that I’ve always loved the movie, it’s a brilliant piece of work and all the actors were fantastic. But it completely turns the message of the book inside out: in the book, the replicants are not people. There’s a scene near the end where Rachael pulls the legs off a spider that is one of the most horrifying things I’ve ever read, because that is the moment when you realize she is not a person and does not have human emotions. I think Philip Dick’s whole point in writing the book was to say — to plead — that trying to create perfect versions of humans is, for lack of a better word, evil. It’s what the Nazis wanted to do. The fact that the filmmakers could take that book and reverse what it meant, and that the story still worked, is a tribute to what a great writer Dick was.
It’s not the job of an adaptation to copy the source; that’s redundant, since the source already exists. The point is to create a new story inspired by the source, in dialogue with it. Sometimes that means offering a conflicting view of its ideas — like Verhoeven’s Starship Troopers satirizing the fascism of the military state that Heinlein’s novel presented in earnest. Or like the way a number of modern writers of color write Lovecraft-mythos stories that confront or offer alternatives to Lovecraft’s deep racism.
I read once that Dick himself considered Blade Runner superior to Do Androids Dream of Electric Sheep? It’s often found on lists of movies that are better than the books they’re based on, along with Jaws, The Godfather, Who Framed Roger Rabbit?, etc.
I wasn’t arguing that the adaptation should copy the source. As I said, I love the movie and it works. But I still think that Dick’s message was that humans should not try to “perfect” humans, and that it’s too easy to assume that something that looks like us is like us.
This is a technically gorgeous film, and so much of a step up from more recent Scott films like Prometheus. It’s just hard for me to watch because, well, Deckard sucks, replicant or no. The “love” scene with Rachael is so uncomfortable, and as the article says, even if the film leaves it subtle, Deckard is the sci-fi equivalent of a fugitive slave law enforcer pre Civil War. Not saying that makes the film bad, just that it was a one-and-done for me.
But that’s the point, as I said above. The movie — in all versions except the theatrical/voiceover one — is about Deckard realizing he’s actually the villain of the story, that he’s fighting for the wrong side. It’s not subtle about that at all; it comes right out and says in the opening that the replicants are slaves.
I adored this film as a child. I probably watched our homemade VHS copy of it a dozen times. I know the voice-over is lampooned (and rightly so) but that didn’t really matter to me. I just loved the look of the thing. It was also pretty freaky to see the guy who played Han Solo/Indiana Jones (they were basically the same person when I was 9) playing an entirely different type of character. I didn’t even know there was a different version of the film until over a decade after the director’s cut came out, and I fell in love with the film all over again, since by that time I was steeped in the kind of fiction that had inspired it.
By the way, I also agree that it doesn’t really matter whether or not Deckard is a replicant. I’d go so far as to say that’s the point.
It is a film I love, but I don’t have much to add. Except that I read Alan E. Nourse’s novel as a teen (Nourse was an important YA writer for me) and so the movie was not what I expected!
I saw BR when it first came out and left the theater underwhelmed. Appreciated the artistry, but found the story boring and the characters meh. I’ve watched it a couple times since and my opinion has never changed. Snooze fest. It’s disappointing, too, because I love Ford and had a huge crush on Young. But choosing a movie for either one, it would never be this. (Those would be Raiders and Stripes.)
To the question of practical effects — again, meh. I don’t understand the current zealotry for practical. There was a 4K restoration that some hobbyist made of the Death Star trench run a year or so ago, and boy did that sequence not stand up to the treatment. The high resolution and clarity imposed on the old school SFX exposed its nature: a tabletop covered with styrofoam, extruded styrene and kit bashed model parts. You think CGI takes you out of a movie, look that turd up. Everything has its place and I believe CGI is every bit an art and craft as model making and pyrotechnics. I don’t think monsters made with rubber suits and makeup are by their very nature better than ones made on a screen at WETA, and vice versa. Depends on the monster.
I see “CGI is so weightless.” Well, no, you know it’s CGI so you’re perceiving weightlessness. The boulder chasing Indy (not to mention the one he pushes out of the wall of the tomb) is also weightless; it’s just there in the room with him. Many people’s ability to suspend disbelief is either underdeveloped or atrophied, is the problem.
And to bring it back to Blade Runner: if Scott and Trumbull had had CGI in 1982, they would have used it. Kubrick would have used CGI. Heck, frickin Alfred Hitchcock would have used CGI.
CGI and practical effects are the same in that they can both be good or bad depending on the talent, time, and budget available to create them. They have different strengths and weaknesses, so it’s silly to frame it as some kind of absolute, all-or-nothing choice between them. Smart FX artists have always used a mix of techniques, the best one for each individual shot, rather than trying to do it all one way. So yes, all those filmmakers would’ve used CGI if the option had been available, but they wouldn’t have rejected practical techniques either, not if they worked better for a given shot. Indeed, modern filmmakers have increasingly outgrown the industry’s immature fixation on trying to do everything with CGI and have rediscovered the benefits of mixing CGI and practical effects seamlessly, using them together to achieve better results than either one alone. That’s not “zealotry,” it’s practicality. It’s getting past the phase of seeing CGI as a new magic tool to be experimented with for everything, and settling into the mature view that it’s one tool in a larger kit, and that the result is what matters regardless of how you create it.
While a masterpiece of worldbuilding, I’m not so sure about the actual story. Well, depending on the cut. Ridley Scott seems determined to make Deckard a replicant these days, when I think it works better with him as a human. The connection made between him and Batty in the end with mere words and memories is much more meaingful to me than… something something, this guy doesn’t know he’s really a replicant. That does nothing for me.
Another thing that’s always kept me at a distance is so much focus on the fairly boring Deckard (played by a I’m-ready-to-go-live-with-the-Amish Harrison Ford), when I would’ve preferred more screen time for Rutger Hauer. He’s fantastic in this movie. He didn’t just save Deckard in the end, he saved the whole friggin’ story with that tears in rain speech.
Again, though, I think the point is that it doesn’t matter whether someone is a human or a replicant. It only matters whether they choose to support the rights of others or to take them away. Anyone with a mindset that allows them to enslave and hunt down replicants could easily do the same to humans that they considered different or inferior.
As disappointing as I found the sequel movie, the most chilling thing about it is the fact that the society knows and accepts without question that replicants are sentient beings, but still enslaves them anyway. It even chooses to give them human memories and emotions in the belief that it will make them more contented slaves. It underlines that the question isn’t even about whether replicants are people; it’s about how people choose to treat other people.
Sure, but I prefer that message be made solely through Batty’s speech, from an artificial being to a natural one. The gulf between man and machine, between master and slave, is bridged through compassion and an appreciation for life. It turns out that memories, real memories, are thicker than blood.
And that’s the cool thing about a deliberately ambiguous story. You can choose whichever interpretation works best for you, and so can everyone else. My preference is that it doesn’t matter. It’s still a master-slave story even if they’re both replicants. After all, real-life slaves are just as human as their enslavers. And members of an enslaved or oppressed group are often co-opted by the oppressors and participate in the oppression of their own people. A replicant Deckard who’s a blade runner is just as much a part of the problem as a human Deckard who’s a blade runner. And since his journey through the movie is to develop empathy for replicants, it ends up in essentially the same place whether he’s a human realizing the difference doesn’t matter or a replicant realizing who he really is.
I was a bit too young when I first saw Blade Runner. I didn’t get it. I wasn’t sure what to make of the bleakness. This wasn’t Star Wars. This version of Harrison Ford didn’t seem very heroic. What was up with that?
I don’t remember why I came back to it, either. Maybe it was just that other people kept talking about it. But I did and I grew into it. Over time, it became a favorite. When the director’s cut came out, I remember lots of discussion with friends about the changes. I vaguely remember a viewing party to compare them, but maybe we only watched the director’s cut. Not sure.
Looking back now, its sometimes hard to separate the film from its legacy, especially since people are busy trying to make it into yet another franchise with endless re-iterations. I understand that impulse. I played and enjoyed the Westwood game. I liked the Villeneuve sequel film. I’ve enjoyed other homages and less-direct attempts to re-capture some of the Blade Runner vibe. I’ll probably at least give the new TV series a shot when it comes out.
But it’s funny, because, I think part of the reason that Blade Runner succeeded in the first place was that it did not overreach. The story is very simple. It isn’t about plot twists and the characters are almost impressionistic sketches. The film (especially in director’s and final cuts) gives you questions and a delicious atmosphere, and then just leaves you to soak in it. I like that.
“I wasn’t sure what to make of the bleakness. This wasn’t Star Wars. This version of Harrison Ford didn’t seem very heroic. What was up with that?”
I imagine this movie was a lot of people’s first exposure to film noir.
or PKD …
A quick note on structure: the mention of Syd Mead should be in the paragraph on visual influences, not the one about effects work.
Blade Runner’s immersive quality seems to have been at least partly accidental. Scott engaged two screenwriters without telling them about each other, and used the pages he liked best from scene to scene. This could be the reason that the film’s L.A. is sometimes bustling and overpopulated, and at other times crumbling and deserted. The miracle is that these competing visions and internal contradictions manage to synthesize a world that feels alive with possibility.
Who designed Leon? Apologies to the late great Brion James, but all the other replicants are stunningly attractive, to the point that one would think the easiest way to detect them in BR’s ugly world would be to JUST LOOK AT THEM.
And if the police have detailed files on, and pictures of, the escaped replicants, including Leon, why would testing be necessary to identify them, especially Leon?
On “Is Deckard a replicant,” I prefer to say no. Not because of anything in the text, which plants a ton of clues in favor of ‘yes,’ but because the final confrontation with Roy has so much more resonance if it’s a contrast between a flesh-and-blood person who’s forgotten how to live and an artificial being who has no time to learn how.
That said, “You’ve done a MAN’s job, sir” is such a devastating line if Deckard is a robot..
“the final confrontation with Roy has so much more resonance if it’s a contrast between a flesh-and-blood person who’s forgotten how to live and an artificial being who has no time to learn how.”
Wow, I couldn’t disagree more. Batty is fully human and doesn’t need to learn; he’s the one teaching the cold, closed-off Deckard how to feel again. He’s the one who’s motivated throughout the film by love for his fellow victims and anger on their behalf, while Deckard is just mechanically, passionlessly following orders. And Batty’s the one who has the compassion to save the life of the ruthless assassin who was sent to kill him and who represents everything he hates. Batty is by far the more human character; indeed, he’s the actual hero of the movie, albeit an antihero. Deckard is the villain he redeems at the end.
And I still say that’s exactly the same whether Deckard is a replicant or not, because the whole point of the movie is that identity and personhood are not defined by origin. What matters isn’t what you are, it’s what you do, and what you choose.
I think the only thing you’re disagreeing with is the ‘no time to learn’ part, which I admit was a stretch. I just liked the sound of it.
Heck, I’m a real person (as far as I know) and with 50 years on Roy I’m still learning.
I’ve been steeped in this movie for decades. Almost all of the expanded universe stuff leaves me cold, with two notable exceptions: the Westwood game, and (against all odds) Villeneuve‘s sequel, which does appear to be a marmite movie for fans. For me, it widened the field of vision just enough, but not too much; it played the familiar notes but invented its own Melodies as well. I hope, given time, we get more tidbits about its creation: alt takes, scripts, production stories, etc.
For the original movie, I found Paul Sammon’s book really fun.
I was not planning on rewatching this, but as with The Matrix, your article made me want to revisit Blade Runner. Beautifully written, thank you!
The Bradbury Building, where much of “Blade Runner” takes place was also the setting for the “Outer Limits” episode “Demon with a Glass Hand,” which was written by Harlan Ellison. (The 1949 film noir “D.O.A.” was also filmed in the Bradbury Building.)
Glad to find someone else who loves Darryl Hannah’s performance here. She is often overlooked in this movie.
The (now defunct) St. Mark’s Place Theatre would air this film every Thursday at midnight for years. I don’t know how many times I went to see it. Those were the days when you could still smoke in theatres, so the theatre was as atmospheric as the film.
I was absolutely fascinated by everything the team had created–the lush cinematography, sets, costumes, and lighting; the expansively and compassionately told story; the strong female characters, the generosity and benevolence (alright, the humanity) of Rutger Hauer’s performance. Immersing myself in that world made me feel more clued in to the fundamental questions in my own life concerning power imbalances and how not to become what you hate.
Together with Lion in Winter, Bladerunner remains my favorite film of all time.
Excellent article. Thanks
Blade Runner is one of my favourite films of all time. For a long time it was my absolute favourite, but now I have a difficult time deciding between it and Alien. The world building is incredible. When my father took my brother and I to see it when I was 12 (primarily because it was Science Fiction and had Harrison Ford ;)), what stuck with me most (besides the uncomfortable violence between Deckard and Rachael) was the visuals. The fact that they made the future look dirty and used made it feel completely real. We are shown enough to know there is much more to this world, but not so much that all of the mystery is removed. I watched the theatrical release a great many times on Beta cassette (which I still have, somewhere;)), and then when the Director’s Cut saw limited release in theatres, I went to see it again on the big screen. There was a lot of rumoured footage still missing (I had heard stories by that time about the unicorn sequence, Deckard visiting Holden in the hospital, and other scenes), but the lack of voiceover narration gave it a different feel. Then, of course, the Final Cut was released, and I feel it’s the best version of the film. It holds up really well, though it’s diffult to separate my experience with the film over the years and be truly objective. I’m not sure what someone seeing it for the first time today would experience.
For me, the revelatory moment in Blade Runner occurs off screen: During the expensive little payphone call between Deckard and Rachael, she responds to his invitation to Taffy Lewis’s by saying it’s not her kind of place (click). Nevertheless, after Deckard’s lethal pursuit of Zhora, and amid Leon’s about-to-be-fatal vengeance, there’s Rachael!
Why? What changed?
Well … nothing changed.
Rachael did what she was built to do. She fell for Deckard. And verse vicea.
Neither of them had a choice in the matter, you see.