Blade Runner (1982) - film review

Los Angeles, 2019.  One-time cop Rick Deckard is lured out of his voluntary retirement by his former boss, Bryant, and recruited as a so-called Blade Runner.  His mission: to track down and kill four rogue replicants, highly advanced androids which are indistinguishable from humans except in their emotional responses.  The androids were created to make life easier for human settlers on the colony worlds, but a party of them rebelled and found their way back to Earth where they pose a threat to humankind.  To test his replicant-detection equipment, Deckard pays a visit to the Tyrell Corporation, the firm that manufactured the androids, only to discover that the boss’s assistant, Rachael, is a replicant, although she does not realise this since she has implanted memories.   As Deckard embarks on his hazardous mission, the rogue replicants are on a quest of their own – to infiltrate the Tyrell Corporation to determine their expiry dates.  Neither Deckard nor his android quarry has a moment to lose...

Now hailed as one of the most influential science-fiction films of all time, Blade Runner was pretty well reviled on its first release, by both critics and filmgoers.  Its bleak vision of a dystopian future in which humans and androids are virtually indistinguishable helped to completely redefine the sci-fi movie in the early 1980s, bringing a degree of realism and sophistication that was nothing less than a revolution.  The film was directed by Ridley Scott, who had recently scored a hit with another equally influential sci-fi film, Alien (1979), and was based on Philip K. Dick’s short novel Do Androids Dream of Electric Sheep?, unquestionably one of the most important works in science-fiction literature.   Although Dick died just before the film was released, he was allowed to view a rough cut of the film and he stated that it accurately reflected the world he had created.

The most striking thing about Blade Runner, and what still makes it so impressive today, is its stark visual design, which combines futuristic sci-fi concepts with the familiar trappings of classical American film noir.  The future is presented not as some perfect Utopian dream but rather as a vision of Hell in which high technological advancement sits alongside abject decrepitude.  It looks like a variant on the Dorian Gray principle: as mankind gets smarter, the world gets uglier.  Dick referred to it as the First Law of Kipple.

The film differs from the novel in many important respects (it is reported that Ridley Scott had only read part of the novel before making the film).  One thing that isn’t dwelt on in the film is that virtually all animals have become extinct, so that owning an animal has become the ultimate status symbol for any human being.  Another omission is the humans’ dependence on an empathy box which provides people with a quasi-religious bonding with a simulated Deity, without which their lives would have no meaning.  It can be argued that by omitting some of these metaphysical and philosophical complexities, the film is diminished in both its humour and its integrity.  However, the film does succeed in capturing the novel’s central themes: the relationship between memory and identity and what it means to be human.  The question we are asked to ponder is whether there is an equivalence between human life as we understand it (or think we understand it) and the quasi-existence of an intelligent machine.  (If there is, then every time we switch off our computer or our washing machine, we are committing wilful murder...)

One of the strengths of Blade Runner is Harrison Ford’s down-to-Earth portrayal of android killer Rick Deckard.   Ford had played similar roles in three hugely successful blockbusters, Star Wars (1977), The Empire Strikes Back (1980) and Raiders of the Lost Ark (1981) but he approached the part of Deckard quite differently.  Rather than the two-dimensional gung-ho action hero of these earlier films, Ford shows us a more contemplative and believable character, a man who is visibly tormented by the work he is required to do.  Although he manages to give one of his best performances, one that combines a brooding intensity with a poignant vulnerability, the actor did not enjoy working on the film at all.  He fell out with Ridley Scott at an early stage (he resented the use of voiceover narration, which he felt weakened the film) and there soon came a point when the two men hated one another so much that they simply gave up talking to one another.  Had other crew members not intervened, Scott could very well have gone the same way as Rick Deckard’s replicant victims...

Since it was first released, Blade Runner has undergone several revisions, the most significant alteration being the removal of the voiceover narration.  It was not until the film’s 25th anniversary in 2007 that Ridley Scott was finally able to put together his definitive director’s cut, which corrected many of the perceived deficiencies of the earlier versions.  This so-called Final Cut is unquestionably Scott’s masterpiece, a film that satisfactorily captures the spirit of Philip K. Dick’s great novel whilst offering a chilling vision of our future world, where the distinction between humans and machines is on the verge of disappearing altogether.   Just what makes you so sure that you are not a Nexus-6 replicant?

© James Travers 2009

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