#97 - Blade Runner (1982) - Ridley Scott

Blade Runner tells the story of a young Harrison Ford wandering around in the rain at night in a future Tokyo-L.A. mashup looking for robot people and trying to get rid of them. Young Harrison plays Rick Deckard, a Blade Runner (which blades are being run is never made clear), tasked with hunting down four Replicants who wreaked havoc somewhere up in space but are now back in town running amok (though the type of havoc and amok are also unclear). This is all explained in text at the beginning of the movie and when it disappears so do the stakes it should establish: the problem is vague and far away and so is any urgency. We don’t know what they did or what they’re doing and can’t we just leave them alone?

The Replicants are androids, robots that look like humans and seem like humans. The only way to identify one is to administer a test using the Voight-Kampff analyzer that detects physical changes as the subject is put through a series of questions designed to elicit an emotional response. The escaped Replicants, however, are more advanced and may have developed emotions. This is why they were given four-year lifespans. But like any conscious emotional beings, the Replicants would like to live longer than four years and the clock is ticking.

Blade Runner is famous for its production design. Flying cars, skyscraper-sized video advertisements, searchlights, neon neon neon everywhere, bleak, black, dark corporations spewing out fire, artificial animals. There’s a sunset in one scene, but the sun stays set and the rain falls. The world is rendered in detail and is a contrast to the opening scrawl; the world explains itself and there is little need for further exposition or explanation to understand the nightmare world of the future, teetering as it is on the precipice of a kind of corporate hell. The movie isn’t a case of style over substance, but style as substance. The film uses the world itself to ask its interesting questions. If it is unclear why the Replicants are being hunted, it is enough that the world says they are to be hunted. The world of Blade Runner is the kind of place where Replicants can’t be.

The vagueness of the Replicant’s crimes creates a lack of urgency as we watch Deckard deal with each of them. But that vagueness is also the main point of the movie. In the opening scene one of the Replicants kills a man who’s doing the Voight-Kampff test on him. The Replicant doesn’t seem like a pleasant guy, but he doesn’t seem evil either. He kills not in cold blood, but in self-defence, or at least self-preservation, and that urge to live and delay mortality is a uniquely human trait (humans being the only species aware of its mortality). The lines are blurred between human and non-human and the movie is really about where that line is. And if that question – what does it mean to be human – seems clichéd, at least Blade Runner asks it in interesting ways. In a world where life can be created, who gets to determine what is genuine and what is not?  

Blade Runner is a neo-noir detective story. Deckard has a job to do and has to find a way to do it. It’s a big one, we’re told at the beginning. And yet he seems to succeed easily, wandering from clue to clue and bumping into Replicants on the street, finding them at work and at home, looking at photos and knowing exactly where they are and killing them off the first chance he gets. Even recruiting him out of retirement is a breeze. He doesn’t do that kind of thing anymore, but then, what the hell, he’s doing it again anyway. Without knowing his motivation, each kill is anticlimactic. Part of that is necessary as we’re left to wonder whether a Replicant making an honest living as a performer really needs to be shot down in her underwear in a crowded street. But Deckard broods through the rain from job to job with animalistic efficiency and no tension. I won’t spoil the ending (I don’t go for the line of thinking that says that since a movie came out in 1982 spoilers are fair game – if you haven’t seen it you haven’t seen it) but it uses Deckard’s mechanical performance to interesting effect. It just isn’t that fun to watch in the meantime.

That isn’t to say it’s not worth watching. Blade Runner is a sci-fi pioneer and a cult classic. Its visuals hold up – its 1980s vision of a grim future on the verge of dystopia is darkly beautiful. And its predictions for the year 2019 are interesting both for what they get right and wrong. But what keeps people coming back (besides it being re-released so many times - I watched the “Final Cut”, which is the last of the movie’s 4 or 5 different versions) is its soft touch amidst its dark and hardened world. The subtlety is the highlight. But it cuts two ways, making the movie both very interesting in the questions it asks and a little boring in the time it takes to ask them.