The long overdue _Blade Runner_ thread

Surely there is no finer science fiction film than this one. Surely.

Tyrell: 66 thousand Prosser and Ankovich. Hmm.. Trade. Trade at--
Computer: New entry. A Mr. J. F. Sebastian. 1-6-4-1-7.
Tyrell: At this hour? What can I do for you Sebastian.
Sebastian:Queen to Bishop 6. Check.
Tyrell: Nonsense. Just a moment. Mmm. Queen to Bishop 6. Ridiculous. Queen to Bishop 6. Hmm... Knight takes Queen. -- What's on your mind Sebastian? What are you thinking about.
Roy:(whispered) Bishop to King 7. Checkmate.
Sebastian:Bishop to King 7. Checkmate, I think.
Tyrell: Got a brainstorm, huh, Sebastian? Milk and cookies kept you awake, huh? Lets discuss this. You better come up, Sebastian.
Sebastian:Mr. Tyrell. I-- I brought a friend.

Harlan Ellison tells the story that at a meeting with him when Scott was considering Dune with Giger on for design (woulda been great), Scott told Ellison that he wanted to be the John Ford of sf. Imagine if?

1) The visuals. God, what visuals. They do not age, which is point of discussion in itself. This movie should look dated, but it doesn't. Why?

2) The tone. It's pitch-perfect crime drama all the way through, without a wink.

3) The themes. In effect: it has some, whereas most movies do not have the balls to have themes. Even the scenes that should be over the top somehow aren't. If the scene where the creation crushes the creator's skull in anger isn't an obvious metaphor, I don't know what is, but it works. See #2.

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.

I watched Black Rain the other week and realized it's a better Blade Runner movie than 2049 is.

Also loved Luv. Terrific baddie. I’m surprised it didn’t get seen as a breakout role (unless I missed something - and I suppose the movie hasn’t been that popular anyway)

Science Fiction Encyclopedia has a good article, incl this passage, which I found helpful:

The numerous cuts of the film are essentially minor variations on three main versions: (i) the workprint version, originally shown to preview audiences only, but given a limited theatrical release following its chance rediscovery in 1990; (ii) the studio version, with new voiceover and happy ending grudgingly added for release; (iii) the unicorn version, without voiceover or post-getaway scene, but including the bizarre unicorn reverie which seems to confirm that Deckard himself is a replicant. (Scott was firm on this notoriously contested point; Ford and producer Michael Deeley roundly rejected it; Fancher wanted it to be ambiguous; Peoples had Deckard understand himself as a merely metaphorical replicant, escaping into a belated true humanity.) The last is now the authorized version, first seen in a now-lost preview cut, but only released to audiences with the misleadingly branded Blade Runner: The Director's Cut of 1992 (actually an edit by other hands adding the unicorn sequence to a tidied-up recreation of the workprint version) and definitively realized in Scott's own digital Blade Runner: The Final Cut of 2006, which like its predecessor also restores some of the more brutal sequences seen originally only in the UK/Europe release.

Also mentions making-of doc being incl. w later DVD releases.

I watched Black Rain the other week and realized it's a better Blade Runner movie than 2049 is.

one of the main plot points in gene wolfe’s “book of the new sun” series is the existence of aquaestors, which are beings created by superior intelligences from the memories of other characters. they are made of some sort of energy field (generally described as light, although they seem to have mass and substance and can pick things up, etc) and can be more or less autonomous. i suppose the best way to describe them is like holodeck characters who are free to wander the universe. over the course of the series, wolfe (who is catholic) repeatedly makes the point that even “real” people and objects are ultimately no less ephemeral (deepak chopra and other people who like to point out that “we’re just empty space filled by fields of energy, maaaaaaan” would probably agree)

this is all to say i like peoples’ interpretation, and it seems to me to match the themes and characters in both movies. sure the replicants have a limited lifespan, but so does jf sebastien, is leon kowalski’s casual disregard for life any more inhuman than harry bryant’s, etc. probably old hat for the purposes of this thread but “we’re all metaphorical replicants” is a good summation of why i’m no longer hung up on the question of whether deckard is a replicant or not

i’d never heard the term “metaphorical replicant” before but i sure do like it!

2049 gets short shrift
Leto is pretty bad tho

Black Rain apes some of the atmosphere and orientalist vibes but otherwise is a rote cops vs bad guys story. Noting conceptually interesting or sci fi about it.

That's why it being better than 2049 shows what a failure 2049 is. 2049's story is moving pieces around on a chess board by someone who doesn't know how to play chess. At least Black Rain makes sense, has thematic coherence.

lot of thematic coherence in 2049! almost too much, you might say. is k's love for joie real? is joie real? if she's not, what difference does that make? if she has her own memories of k, memories that can be erased forever, doesn't that make her unique - almost human? is k's sense of loss any less for her being an AI instance? is it a coincidence that joie wants k to be called "joe" - basically her own name? because he is equally artificial? but equally unique, insofar as he has had a unique set of experiences and memories (well, all the ones since the implants)? when any of us kiss another, aren't there ghosts in our heads of how one ought to kiss, or of others we have kissed before? or even fantasies of someone else we wish we were kissing? what status does that confer on the person we're actually kissing? if we feel a memory deeply, does it matter that it's false if it feels true to us?

i get really hung up on the ways people delude themselves and whether or not those delusions make a difference, and this movie is catnip for that stuff

Yeah, and I think this is the subtext appeal of several Philip K. Dick novels.

Is anyone really watching 2049 for the plot?

just the articles

I read the novel and have little to no recollection of how it ends, but I seem to remember it does not end happily.

I've always been disappointed with Blade Runner. At heart it's essentially a 1970s-style "Vietnam veteran returns from the war" film that for the most part follows a bunch of dull nobodies who are tangental to the actual story. It's not a case where the Replicants would have lost their impact if they had been overused; I wanted to know more about them. They escaped from hell into a city where people lived forever, but they were treated like pests, hunted down and killed. As if they were the guest workers who built the World Cup stadium in Qatar. Superfluous unpeople who were no longer necessary. It's essentially a lefty film in which the ruling classes create disposable workers who just happen to be living creatures, and then kill them when they're no longer necessary so that they don't have to pay pensions etc. Which might explain why it didn't do boffo box office in the United States.

Imagine a society that executes guest workers and vagrants just for existing. Executes them in the streets so frequently that people just walk around the bodies. What would that society be like? How did it get that way? What do the pests feel about being hunted down? That would be the basis for an interesting film, but none of it comes through in the limited glimpses we get of the world circa 2019. The film introduces a bunch of interesting ideas but never explores them in great depth, which is why twentysomething men on the internet love it - it feels like a substantial work of art. It's an imitation of art without any of the boring stuff, or any of the girly emotional stuff. Not like e.g. Balthazar. And it looks great on a big TV.

I saw the sequel at the BFI Imax when it came out. 07 October 2017, according to my emails. It started off with an interesting mystery but fell apart like one of those TV shows where the writers didn't know how it was going to end. It had all the same problems as the original. There were germs of good ideas that were thrown away. Individual sequences worked - e.g. the drone strike sequence - but it didn't go into any great depth. I can't remember what happened to the chief villain (he seemed to fade out of the narrative) and the central question of engineering an artificial life form that can reproduce sexually doesn't make a lot of sense on a technical level. I hoped that the film would play up the idea of robots replacing Replicants in more detail, just as how in real life waves of ever-cheaper labour are imported by the ruling classes in order to wipe out the previous wave of imported labour, but that went nowhere. Again, it has the form of substance without any substance.

After watching the credits I realised I had met someone who worked on the film - I think she did some of the motion capture modelling. It's a small world. It's been said before but Blade Runner, ET, The Thing, and Star Trek II: The Wrath of Khan came out within a few weeks of each other, so that must have been a great time to be a regular cinemagoer. Imagine a Smash Brothers fighting game that mashes all of those franchises up! Obviously the Replicants would die if the match went on longer than four years. I just want to see topless George Takei in his prime kicking ET in the face. Is that too much to ask?

I just want to see topless George Takei in his prime kicking ET in the face.

This I would watch!

I saw it in the theater when it came out in 82--I was about 16, and so at a pretty good age for this kind of thing. (I had seen Alien a few years prior with my dad and was blown away.) At the time, I found it a letdown for reasons I couldn't articulate beyond "this was a weird part for Harrison Ford." Reading the excerpt from Pauline Kael's review upthread, I realize now that that was exactly my beef with it: there is little to no dramatic tension. It's primarily, if not exclusively, a visual experience, and I've since come to appreciate it for that. I have also realized that the tensions between Ford and Scott come through in the film's execution. IIRC, Ford intentionally read his voiceovers in the most obnoxious tone he could come up with. That said, I find the film without the voiceovers almost dull. I watched that version with my own kids when they were around the same age I was when I first saw it, and they were, to put it mildly, underwhelmed.

Maybe it helps to have read the novel first: I seem to recall seeing things that didn't make it into the film, at least the cut I saw. Like with having read Going Clear before seeing The Master, but I think I would have gotten most of that anyway.
I liked the intentionally overbearing voiceovers; they reminded me of Sterling Hayden!

The film without the voiceovers is almost incomprehensible.

I read the book sometime after seeing the movie; as I said above, I can't remember much about it. I remember Deckard being married, and near the end of the novel he's wandering in the wasteland and finds an electric toad which he mistakes for a real animal. Typical PDK mindfuck and a very different vision than Scott's.

good post ashley but part of the reason we don’t know much about the replicants is they don’t really have lives or pasts. they were just created and are what, four years old or something? (iirc their incept dates are all 2015 or 16)

besides if there had been a bunch of offworld colonies flashbacks it would have made roy’s line about having “seen things you people wouldn't believe: attack ships on fire off the shoulder of orion … beams in the dark near the tannhauser gate”. as it is, since we have no idea about that stuff until right then it’s like a “holy shit, he’s not wrong!” moment

meant to write it would have made his line *fall flat*, robbed it of its power, etc

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