The long overdue _Blade Runner_ thread

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