Let's have a look at Blade Runner (1982), but to make things real
spicy-like I saw it on the IMAX screen at London's Science Museum. I've always
been disappointed with Blade Runner, but I decided that if I was going
to eat the cheeseburger I might as well eat the hell out of it.
For the record the IMAX screening was a digital presentation of
The Final Cut of 2007, which tightens up the editing and fixes
some special effects gaffes that were still present in the
Director's Cut of 1992. The screening I saw began with the Ladd
Company logo. There was lots of film grain, which is not a bad thing at all -
it reminded me of Chungking Express at times - and on a visual
level I am pleased to say the film has held up.
Director Ridley Scott wanted
the futuristic Los Angeles of 2019 to look as if the twentieth century had
coalesced into a big pile of beautiful detritus, and Blade Runner's
clutter is still beautiful.
It was accompanied by a talk from
a roboticist from UCL
and a short interview with associate producer Ivor Powell. I
learned from the former that it is possible to remotely control a cockroach. Imagine if we
could remotely control something useful, like an aeroplane or a car. Or a helicopter. Is
Blade Runner any good? No.
Look, I get Blade Runner. I grew up in the 1980s. I am not a
fuddy-duddy. Blade Runner is one of the most influential
science fiction films of that decade, alongside Alien,
The Terminator, Aliens, and RoboCop, and yes I know that Alien came out in 1979. You don't have to point that out.
You're also going to point out that Blade Runner is a lot
more sophisticated than those films, but that's not true.
Blade Runner has the surface appearance of sophistication. It has lovely cinematography and a measured pace,
but there's an emptiness to it. Especially compared to RoboCop, which had a lot to say about greed,
vanity, and delusion. In comparison Blade Runner feels like
a summary of substance, an index of substantial topics with no text.
On the positive side the film still looks awesome. The careful use of colour
and intelligent use of sound effects as a storytelling device are
recognisably modern. Even in its original, pre-Director's Cut, pre-Final Cut form, Blade Runner recognisably belonged to the modern
age. The fashions are timeless. The use of old-fashioned television
displays and mechanical computer relays feel like a deliberate stylistic
choice. Even Vangelis' electronic score - heavy with atmospheric washes and bassy sound
effects - has aged gracefully. The surprising thing is that the synthesisers
haven't dated; it's the saxophone and electric piano that sound of their time,
not the Yamaha CS-80 and the Lexicon reverb.
But as a story it's a mess. You have to understand that I get
Blade Runner. I get it. The film was released on the very same day as
John Carpenter's The Thing, which had a similarly rough ride from
contemporary film critics. They hated The Thing. Vincent Canby of the
New York Times described it as "instant junk", comma, "a foolish, depressing, overproduced movie that mixes horror with science
fiction to make something that is fun as neither one thing or the other".
But he was dead wrong. The Thing is a masterpiece. It deftly
mixes visceral shocks with a creeping, underlying sense of doom. The gore
effects establish that the film is not messing around, but for the most part
the film's impact comes from its restrained, ratcheted tension and sense of hopeless dread. The critics
were wrong about The Thing because they didn't get it.
The critics weren't quite so dismissive of Blade Runner. They praised
its looks but were unmoved by the rest of it. Janet Maslin, also of the
Times, loved the visuals but described its story as a mess. And so
did I, a few paragraphs ago, but that's because it's true. It's a mess.
Janet Maslin wasn't an old fuddy-duddy who didn't understand
Blade Runner's brilliance. She got the film. She got the film. She was right.
The standard narrative is that the film was killed at the box office by
ET, but that's not true. The two films had completely difference
audiences. Blade Runner failed to turn a profit because it was a
poorly-reviewed, slow-paced detective story with bursts of nasty
ultraviolence aimed at an adult audience that still pooh-poohed sci-fi.
It was released within a few weeks of Conan the Barbarian,
Mad Max 2, Star Trek 2: The Wrath of Khan, Tron, and
Firefox - May-June-July 1982 sounds fantastic - all of which at
least made back their budgets, so I imagine the typical moviegoer of 1982
was perfectly capable of seeing more than one film at the cinema.
Blade Runner didn't fail because the people of 1982 were
sentimental morons, it failed because it was an expensive, slow-paced
detective film aimed at an audience that didn't exist.
Over time Blade Runner found a new audience of starry-eyed kids
such as myself who were mesmerised by its visuals, so it became something of
a mainstream cult, an underdog. In the age of Akira and
Syndicate it wasn't fashionable to say bad things about
Blade Runner, because if you did, you were square. You didn't
get it. You were an old fuddy-duddy like Vincent Canby. And so people my age
learned to pretend to like Blade Runner even though we had
doubts. We bought it when it came out on the latest high-def optical format
but didn't watch it. We kept the Blu-Ray in the wrapper.
Let's talk about the good stuff. On a visual level Blade Runner codified the look
of the future throughout the rest of the 1980s. The light through blue
smoke; the spotlights; the Japanese-language adverts. The cinematography
makes extensive use of narrow depth of field and chiaroscuro, in
contrast to the flat, television-style lighting of so many contemporary
films. The editing is punchy. Even the use of bass drops on the soundtrack
feels contemporary. It doesn't look like a science fiction film from 1982.
It looks like a proper film, a real film, a grown-up film.
And Rutger Hauer gives a fantastic performance as a charismatic, violent
man-child who burns with righteous indignation at his crummy lot in life. He
only appears for a few minutes, and only has a few lines, but the film
lights up when he is on the screen.
Ditto Brion James, who spent the rest of his career playing belligerent
heavies on account of this film. And Daryl Hannah, who plays a variation of
Hauer's role, as a child-like killer who wears an emotional mask she can
remove at will, while simultaneously giving the impression that under it all
she might have some genuine emotions. They are all tragic characters, driven
to kill by impulses they cannot understand, created as disposable tools by a
heartless world, but the film largely ignores them. They dominate my memories
of the film, but they're barely in it.
At heart Blade Runner is a variation of
The Deer Hunter or First Blood. It's a film in which
soldiers return from the war to find themselves alienated from a world that
doesn't want them. But instead of focusing on the former soldiers, Blade Runner follows a detective who hunts them, because the producers needed a
big star name, and he couldn't be a villain, so they hired Harrison Ford,
but gave him nothing to do. And because he needed a love interest they hired
Sean Young, and gave her nothing to do either. Young makes the most of what
she has but Ford was apparently not enthused with the material, and it
shows.
Beyond that the film (a) is too prosaic to work as a detective mystery (b) is
badly-paced, with a busy opening and a dull middle section (c) raises a number of interesting sci-fi ideas but then does
nothing with them (d) is surprisingly simple and linear for its length (e) is
just generally overstuffed. The sequel, Blade Runner 2049, had almost
exactly the same problems, but was more engaging as a story because it had an
underlying mystery. And at least it tried to explore its sci-fi ideas, although it was still muddled.
Reviewers in 1982 pointed out that our hero's detective work is perfunctory,
as did Harrison Ford himself, and they were right. Ford's character does a
little bit of detective work involving some photographs and a snake scale, but
everything after that relies on coincidences of timing and geography. The baddies essentially run into him. You
might argue that Blade Runner is about more important things than detective work, but why couldn't the writers at least make the detective aspect
interesting? Or added at least one plot twist, or something unexpected? It wouldn't have done any harm.
I haven't explained the plot. Blade Runner is a detective film set in Los
Angeles in the year 2019, which in 1982 was almost forty years in the future.
The city is blanketed in pollution. Humanity has developed robot slaves to do
all the heavy work, but they're only authorised for use in the off-world
colonies. The robot slaves - replicants - are almost
indistinguishable from human beings, but smarter, stronger, more durable. Our
superiors in every way.
Three things distinguish them from us. They are brought into the world as
adults, with implanted memories, so they lack the emotional development of
human beings who have spent a lifetime learning to deal with disappointment
and rejection and having to take the bus to a post office on the estate
because the local Argos has closed and the nearest Click and Collect depot is
miles away. Secondly they're a lot stronger, although the film implies that
they aren't superhuman, just massively more efficient (otherwise presumably
the authorities could detect them by sticking pins into their arms, or
something).
And thirdly they have a lifespan of just four years. The film implies that the
replicants are unaware of this, although the villains find out somehow. They
flee to Earth in the hope that they might extend their lives, in the process
leaving a trail of death behind them, because they have nothing to lose, no
reason to hold back. Blade Runner is essentially two parallel
detective stories, one in which the escaped replicants try to arrange a
meeting with the boss of the company who made them, another in which a
detective tracks them down. The replicants achieve their goal first, only to
find out that they are doomed, and at that point the detective's story just
peters out.
There's a second plot. Early in the film the boss of the company that makes
the replicants introduces a new model to the detective. She is more human-like
than the other replicants. The fact that this character is a replicant is
played as a mystery, but only briefly. No sooner is the character introduced
than we learn she is not real. She learns the truth shortly afterwards, in a
scene that might have had more impact if we knew her, or if it had been a
surprise. Sean Young is asked to express what must be intense emotions at the
realisation her entire life is a lie, and although she does a good job the
script doesn't help her at all.
A better film might have gone on to ask why human beings are real, and perfect
duplicates of humans are not, but Blade Runner doesn't seem to
care. Sean Young is fine in the role but ultimately the character is given
little more screentime than the villains, and the romance between her and
Harrison Ford's detective isn't engaging.
There's a persistent theory that the detective himself is an advanced
replicant, in which case the romantic angle would actually make sense. The
film would be about two emotionally-stunted robots learning to become human. Another film might have treated that as a hopeful outcome, because if robots
can learn to love there is hope for the future, but again
Blade Runner tentatively raises this theme but does nothing with
it, as if the screenwriters had been told to make a tough action thriller and
not trouble the audience with too many ideas.
It's so frumple. Blade Runner could have been great, but the story
is just too prosaic to work by itself, and underneath it the film has a
peculiar lack of curiosity. Does the average person in the street know that
megacorporations are breeding slaves? Wouldn't that be a major political issue
in the United States of 2019? Wouldn't the reveal that the villains are
replicants have been more impactful if it had been kept hidden until later in
the film?
As it stands, the nature of replicants is explained in a clumsy "as you know"
dialogue scene right at the beginning, during which the stereotypical chief of
police explains replicants to a man who has spent his career
hunting them down.
The film's production design was strip-mined by oodles of films and video
games. This kitchen immediately put me in mind of the latter-day Deus Ex
games.
Wouldn't it have been interesting if the film had shown humanity on the verge
of extinction, with the emotionally-stunted robot duplicates as our only
chance of preserving something of humanity? The book explores that theme, and
the film's portrait of a world where animal life has suffered mass extinctions
alludes to it, but as with so much of the film this wisp of an idea is raised
but never explored.
And that's Blade Runner in a nutshell. It's a frustrating
missed opportunity. If the film had picked a single sci-fi idea, or built an
interesting mystery, I would love it. It reminds me of
Deus Ex: Human Revolution, in the sense that both works allude to a
mass of interesting ideas but never commit to exploring any one of them in
depth.
It could have been a film in which a set of tragic anti-heroes realise that
they are doomed to be left behind by a future that doesn't need them, as in
The Wild Bunch, or a mystery in which humanity attempts to cheat mass
extinction by building a replacement that can survive in a harsh new world, as
in The Talos Principle, or even just a solid action-adventure thriller
along the lines of Manhunter, or a philosophical work that examines
what it is to be real, as in Toy Story, but ultimately it's a
mystery-less detective film, an unromantic romance, an unexciting action film,
a philosophical meditation with the depth of an Ultravox video.
But it looks fantastic, I'll give it that.
EDIT: After writing this a couple of things struck me. This shot is puzzling:
Puzzling because it looks as if it was filmed by pointing a camera at a screen playing back the footage. As if it was mobile phone footage of a television screen. It stands out because it's wobbly and fuzzy and lasts for several seconds. I don't have a copy of the original version of the film to hand but I wonder if it was rehearsal footage spliced in for pacing issues.
A few months before Blade Runner was released Ridley Scott directed a commercial for Chanel. It was part of a series that began in 1979. One of the film's most iconic shots originally came from the Chanel commercial:
In the 1980s Ridley Scott was often dismissed as a lightweight visual stylist, a brash analogue of the nascent New Romantic movement. In my opinion he was just ahead of the curve.
