Blade Runner (1982)

Blade Runner (1982)

I remember my first viewing of 1982’s Blade Runner. From the director of Alien, the guy who starred in Star Wars and Raiders of the Lost Ark, and a science fiction setting that was marketed as some sort of sci-fi adventure in the vein of Star Wars, this couldn’t go wrong, right? My young teenage self was in for utter disappointment. I did not expect a deep, thoughtful movie that explores what it means to be human. With hardly any action scenes, I was pretty disappointed. More than ten years later, I gave the film a chance with a more mature pair of eyes. I certainly was able to appreciate the wonders of the movie a lot more. This is one of those films that is always misunderstood at first, but people come back to appreciate it later on. Like this one particular viewer!

Ridley Scott, coming off his highly successful horror sci-fi Alien wanted to direct something with more meaning and lyrical, so he was given Hampton Fancher’s script to read. Based on Philip K. Dick’s story, “Do Androids Dream of Electric Sheep,” the script tackles some dark themes and it ask questions like, “should we value humans without emotions or androids with emotion?” The movie and the script borrows themes from classic Greek literature and from the Bible itself. Even with a narrow teenage mind, I was impressed at the overt religious overtone the film had. This film meant much to Scott because he wanted to tackle this kind of project after the death of his older brother. He did have to combat his producers and the studio over this project. For example, he was forced to add mediocre narration that took away from the story. Luckily, he took out that narration in the Director’s Cut, released many years later.

It is the year 2019, in the futuristic city of Los Angeles. (I really love how the movie portrayed the year we are currently in). The race of man was able to create technology that allowed them to make humanoids with short, fixed lifespans called replicants. These replicants were banned from Earth and sent to off-world colonies. The main character of the story, Rick Deckard (Harrison Ford) is a Blade Runner. A Blade Runner is a cop whose specialization is to hunt down any escaped replicants. When four replicants led by Roy Batty (Rutger Hauer) makes their way to Earth, Deckard has to hunt them down while truly discovering who he is himself.

I thought the performances were very good. Harrison Ford also wanted to have a deeper, symbolic role and he was intrigued by the questions this film asked. He gave a meaningful, but low-key performance. It’s a shame that he often clashed with Ridley Scott on set, but these two did not get along. Rutger Hauer delivered the film’s best performance. With his striking blond hair and eyes, no one can forget his villainous performance that goes down in the history books as one of the best. I also liked Sean Young’s performance as the replicant Rachael who believes that she is human. Keep an eye out for other great supporting performances from Edward James Olmos, M. Emmett Walsh, and Daryl Hannah.

I was blown away with the futuristic design and the special effects. The look of the film was created by Douglas Trumbull, the same man who worked on the effects for 2001: A Space Odyssey. There is also a nice use of product placement in the film, which is the most memorable in my mind. Such advertisements from Coca-Cola and Atari were used. Fun fact! The sales of these companies dropped after appearing in the film, later known as the “Blade Runner Curse.” Some designs that stood out to me, excluding the whole futuristic look, were the cop cars known as spinners and a lie detector test known as the Voight-Kampff Machine. Philip K. Dick passed away before the film began production, but he was pleased at the look of the film. The visions he saw matched the visions of his brain.

Another important part of the movie is the music. Coming off his Academy Award win for his famous score for 1981’s Chariots of Fire, he creates an atmospheric synth-based score. The atmospheric music complements the film very well, and who can forget the tenor sax love theme. If anything is wrong with the movie, it is definitely not the music!

Many film buffs call Blade Runner one of the best science-fiction films of all time. In my own humble opinion, it is definitely one of the most important films to the genre, but maybe there have been better movies, quality-wise. That said, this is still a very good film. My biggest issue is the pacing and the off-hand narration, but Ridley Scott directs this film like an expert. It is a character-driven, theme-based movie that asks many important questions. I do like how they leave many of these questions ambiguous. Of course, the biggest question of all: Is Rick Deckard a replicant?

My Grade: B+