The long overdue _Blade Runner_ thread

I didn't know that! It's SO perfect.

-- Ned Raggett (ne...), April 17th, 2006.

thats a great book! truly a labor of love. its so jam-packed with info. its really a treasure trove for anyone who loves the film.

xpost - don't say "quite" anymore.

also: weird '80s references to race and stuff, à la "goonies" and "gremlins." you don't see that anymore for some reason.

the unexpected thing about this film is that the scenes of violence are the worst in the film, and the climax isn't as exciting as you'd hope. it breaks the mood of frustrated desire and apprehension that the film works so hard to build.

has anyone evaluated scott as an action director? i mean, the "action" scenes of this film really let it down, as much for narrative as visual reasons. and IIRC the action scenes of "gladiator" left a lot to be desired as well.

sometimes i feel similarly about david lynch, although he has been known to make really interesting things out of pretty violent scenes.

also i've been told the ending of the director's cut is TOO SUBTLE but

***SPOILERS***

it's hard to imagine how they could have telegraphed the message "DECKERT IS A REPLICANT" any clearer than the edward james olmos character placing the unicorn origami figure outside his apartment. i am impressed by the *economy* of this motif though--they don't overdo it.

okay, I like the Director's Cut way more.

i was 12 or 13, just old enough for my dad to take me (he wanted to see it, so i think taking me became kind of a way for him to justify an evening away from home). completely blew my mind.

i think it makes most sense in the context of the urban dystopia films of the time. it's the ultimate urban dytopia, even more than taxi driver or the warriors or escape from new york or whatever. and more prescient by a long shot, because those movies were all predicated on urban desolation, whereas in blade runner the wealth hasn't abandoned the city, it's just moved even farther up above it than before. in a lot of those other movies, you're meant to assume that there's wealth somewhere, but it's certainly not in the city, it's fled somewhere far away. in blade runner, it's right there in your face, looming up above in the penthouses (and selling things to you from giant billboards, recruiting you to go work shit jobs in outer space for megacorporations).

i still love it. but just for fun, here's a little of pauline kael's review (from july 7, 1982):

Blade Runner is a suspenseless thriller; it appears to be a victim of its own imaginative use of hardware and miniatures and mattes. At some point, Scott and the others must have decided that the story was unimportant; maybe the booming, lewd and sultry score by Chariots-for-Hire Vangelis that seems to come out of the smoke convinced them that the audience would be moved even if the vital parts of the story were trimmed.

...Blade Runner doesn't engage you directly; it forces passivity on you. It sets you down in this lopsided maze of a city, with its post-human feeling, and keeps you persuaded that something bad is about to happen. Some of the scenes seem to have six subtexts but no text, and no context either.

...[T]his movie loses track of the few expectations it sets up, and the formlessness adds to a viewer's demoralization -- the film itself seems part of the atmosphere of decay. Blade Runner has nothing to give the audience -- not even a second of sorrow for Sebastian. It hasn't been thought out in human terms. If anybody comes around with a test to detect humanoids, maybe Ridley Scott and his associates should hide. With all the smoke in this movie, you feel as if everyone connected with it needs to have his flue cleaned.

Scott is not a consistent director in any genre, but dude, watch one Alien.

what a bad joke

not that she's entirely wrong, but it's 95% opinion, 5% description, and a few too many puns

also kenan you sound like an ass

Well, Alien is a horror film, not an action film, so maybe you're onto something. But you sound like an ass most of the time, too.

Try it out, it's UNCANNY.

also a lot of her reasons for disliking the movie were part of its strength! it really is a visual movie, despite the powerful score and quotable dialogue. 'the design is the statement", etc. IIRC she didnt like 2001 either.

Yes! I always thought this was clear too, yet have heard a lot of people argue against it, though with no footing, mostly "He can't be!" Get one ability to follow metaphor? I don't know.

-- gypsy mothra (meetm...), April 17th, 2006.

otm!

(altho if she hadn't retired she might've raved up mission to mars).

oh man that movie

*begin digression*

mission to mars is soooo bad. we saw on it on my brother's b-day and he was so exasperated at the movie and its retardedness that when the alien hologram thingie shed a tear he burst out laughing in the crowded theater, making a bunch of others laugh with him. god bless my brother.

and goddamn the amount of eye shadow gary sinise wears in this movie.

*end digression*

Ebert!

Ebert gave this movie three stars. He did not understand it at all.

i think in one of his reviews he admitted he prolly would have rated it higher if he was reviewing it nowadays.

Before the shooting began, Christopher Nolan invited the whole film crew to a private screening of Blade Runner (1982). After the film he said to the whole crew, "This is how we're going to make Batman."

Though they do both have Rutger Hauer. ;-)

very true, but the scene seemed so close

um... you think we just figured this out right now?

also i’ve read the pkd book several times, actually recently reread in a small “library of america” hardcover edition, collected with man in high castle, stigmata of palmer eldritch and ubik. made me do a double take when i saw it in the sci fi section of the bookstore!

not much to say about it here except it’s sooooo far off from the film that reading it doesn’t give much insight into blade runner imo

It's not one of Dick's best books. Don't even know why it was chosen for adaptation when much more interesting books like Flow My Tears The Policeman Said weren't.

I remember seeing the poster for the movie when it was new but I was 11 so wasn't going to R-rated movies. Bought the Marvel comic adaptation (which used the voiceover as captions), and eventually saw the movie years later on VHS, I think when the "director's cut" was released. I own the 4DVD box that came out some years ago that has the "final cut" on one disc, the long-ass documentary on another, the other cuts (theatrical, international from '82, early '90s director's cut) on another, and a whole disc of extras.

i like it! and i’d recommend it to sci fi or pkd fans, but yeah, there are definitely several others by him that are much better. definitely the weakest in that set

Seemed like there were some details in the book that may have helped me get into the movie's backstory, the deteriorata.

Hmmm

Amazon has ordered a ‘Blade Runner’ sequel series. The live-action project, titled “Blade Runner 2099” will take place fifty years after the events of ‘Blade Runner 2049’. Silka Luisa serves as showrunner with Ridley Scott as executive producer https://t.co/iVscokBeQ3

— Lost In Film (@LostInFilm) September 15, 2022

How many Nexus 8 replicants are still banging around

Also will Ford be in this with prostheses making him look 115 years old

They will use computers to make CG Sean Young look like Harrison Ford.

Honestly, I'm just impressed they're not making a prequel.

Blade Runner 1989: Rise of Tyrell

I would be 100% on board for Blade Runner 1989

I would be 100% on board for Blade Runner 1989

the anime Blade Runner: Black Lotus had a couple moments but it was insanely slow and overly-telegraphed. kind of ended up being a prequel to 2049

Blade Runner 1889 with a tie-in to the Back to the Future cinematic universe.

Blade Runner 109 set in the Off-Rome Colonies

Blade Runner Nine-Nine set in New York's finest replicant hunting division. Hilarity ensues.

Blade Runner COPS 911: a reality tv series where you ride along with the police as they patrol the streets of Los Angeles, looking for replicants to retire.

i watched this with my boys

they loved the first half, hated the second half

it is a little weird, making your protagonist a bad guy and having him played by harrison ford, having the cops be bad guys, also having the replicants be bad guys

my adhd 14yo said the crowd scenes made him feel anxious and horrible. i was like yeah that’s what they were going for. he’s incredulous. “why would they want to make people feel that way??”

who is the what now

is it a controversial thing to say that deckard is the bad guy? maybe i'm ahead of myself but this hot take must have been typed out somewhere before. let's consider the evidence:

- he's a cop
- as the opening crawl reminds us, he executes replicants. it's not called that. but that's what he does. he's an executioner. he's a deadly tool of the state. he drinks to forget it. but that's all he is. why does he execute them? not because they slaughtered 23 people. (and did they? really?) he would execute them even if they killed no one. them's the rules.
- when he meets zhora backstage she's charming, suspicious, tough, glamorous - she's a complex personality. deckard puts on a weird voice and pretends to be a bureaucrat. she's seen it all before and she's not scared (she can take care of herself) but it's a vivid reminder of how deckard has just shrunk down to one dimension: a man with a gun. whereas zhora has a whole personality, a life
- he's apparently fine with just shooting his weapon on a massively overcrowded street??
- when he finally shoots zhora it's heartbreaking
- when leon gets ahold of him it feels like justice
- when rachel hesitates to kiss him, deckard blocks her exit from the apartment, throws her against the wall, and demands that she say she wants him. it's physical assault and it's mentally abusive
- batty mockingly calls out in the nightmarish hide and seek at the end.. "i thought you were good! aren't you the good man?"

what you've got is an executioner who is happy enough to kill every replicant he meets apart from the one he has convinced to be his sexbot

All sounds about right. Isn't that the point, really.

i guess it was?! i mean.. i do feel kind of dumb for getting the point about 40 years late.

and.. i should have known morbs had posted about this

Deckard...can be power or he can be vulnerable to power. He chooses power. And power means murder.

The first such murder we witness is that of a woman who escaped slavery and came to Earth. She has found herself a job. It’s a degrading job, a job that even the hard-boiled, world-weary Deckard flinches away from watching. But it’s a job. She is participating in society. She is working. She’s doing the things that she has to do in order to be a part of the world that she risked everything to reach.

Deckard comes to her workplace. He finds her there, and he knows what she is, and she runs away from him because she knows what cops do to women like her. He chases her through the street and corners her. He aims his gun at her through a crowd of people. He squints. He takes a second too long to decide whether to shoot. She runs again.

(Nobody tells you about that part, when you tell them you’re about to watch Blade Runner for the first time. They tell you about all the different versions, and they tell you about the ambiguity of the ending, and they tell you about the fact that all the effects are practical effects. But nobody tells you about the part where a cop aims a loaded firearm into a crowd of people and tries to decide whether it’s worth risking their lives in order to murder an escaped slave.)

https://www.tor.com/2017/10/03/this-future-looks-familiar-watching-blade-runner-in-2017/

― ice cream social justice (Dr Morbius), Wednesday, 11 October 2017 19:39 (five years ago)

(that's written by the brilliant sarah gailey btw)

oh I was thinking you’d just watched 2049

carry on