The Old Blade Runner!

Blade Runner was a remarkable movie for its time. In 1982 science fiction had fallen almost completely under the spell of Star Wars and as successful as that had been it wase getting very tired. A smart dystopian sci-fi movie like Blade Runner injected subsequent films with the ability to get darker which they did with some gusto. Harrison Ford is remarkable in this movie, evoking as much as he ever did that Humphrey Bogart vibe he was able to tap into from time to time. Rutger Hauer was a revelation to me in this movie, stealing the last half of the movie completely with his idiosyncratic presentation of "Roy Baty". Others do wonderful jobs in demanding roles. The biggest star was the world of Blade Runner itself, a grim projection of a future ruled by diminished expectations and besotted with endless rain and gloom. 

The movie was based on Philip K. Dick's Do Androids Dream of Electric Sheep? I gave this 1968 classic science fiction novel another read before diving into the latest watch of the movie which made it famous. It's mostly here of course, our protagonist Rick Deckard is a bounty hunter and he does seek out and kill wayward androids in a world which is largely left behind as humanity has abandoned the planet to seek its future in space. But in the novel he's married and his later attractions to an android named Rachael have much more grim consequences. The one thing the novel pushes forward which the movie largely ignores is the role of animals in this future society. Much more is made of the fact that the animals have all but expired and they have become strange fetish items which not only are there for mental stability (like today's emotional support animals I suppose) but they are wildly expensive and so have become symbols of financial success. There's a whole religious aspect called "Mercerism" which is not at all mentioned in the movie that's a good thing since it's very hard to fathom at places in Dick's book. 

The director Ridley Scott does a fine job of honing down the story into a noir thriller which the novel is not. He takes the chase and focuses on that aspect, allowing the possible "humanity" of the androids to become the central issue. There has been more than a few revisions and hot debate about the ending of Blade Runner and the version I saw this time was the "Final Cut" which ends with Deckard and Rachael leaving his apartment and then a quick cut to credits. This ending is the one which is best in keeping with the tone of the rest of the movie. I have seen the others and to my mind they undermine the atmosphere of the movie's darkness. Will Deckard and Rachael survive? We don't know, but that's for another movie. And as it turns out, decades later they made another movie.  

Blade Runner 2049 is a deeply flawed movie, but a stunningly beautiful one. The visual gimmicks in this one are more than a match for the original, though the accomplishment in the original is greater since the tools used were more primitive. In the sequel we follow an android "Blade Runner" named "Joe" (eventually) played with typical flat affect by Ryan Gosling who has a holographic girlfriend played by the beautiful Ana de Armas and memories he cannot account for. After a tremendous beginning featuring Dave Batista as an android named Sapper, the movie steadily loses steam over its immense nearly three-hour running time. By the time we get to the denoument, it's hard to care because you're just so eager for it all to end. It's no secret that Harrison Ford shows up in this one as a weary Deckard and the secrets which motivate the movie are good ones. But sadly, the movie just lollygags along and seems to fall in love with its own imagery, allowing the focus to fade too often.

The novel by Philip K. Dick is a great read. The original Blade Runner is a must-see movie which like another apocalyptic movie titled The Road Warrior, transformed the sci-fi cinema of the era. The sequel is for hardcore fans alone. There's nothing missing from the first movie, so there's nothing essential revealed in the second. Time watching it is time lost like "tears in rain". 

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