I've seen "Blade Runner" a number of times over the years in all three of its 'official' cuts and it's a film I will keep watching regularly. I'm not going to try to get too deep into it here, but just wanted to make a couple of quick observations from seeing it again last night.
If anyone reading this hasn't seen this film - see it. It's a work of outstanding vision and influential on so much of the dystopian science-fiction that would follow.
This time around I was even more impressed with the world that Director Ridley Scott creates, but felt disappointed and even disconnected from the narrative. Let's look at the positive first.
"Blade Runner" will be 32 years old this year and, set in 2019, is only five years away from that situation almost unique to sci-fi of being a film that predicts the future we've already lived. That always make it easy to see quite how dated some of the film's 'future' looks now that it's the present, but this is a vision of future past that stands up really well.
As a film made before CGI could do much other than simulate 'futuristic' computer displays, "Blade Runner" creates a very tactile world that is compelling and easy to relate to, no matter how different from our actual present it is. Most of the effects work stands up remarkably well. Some of the 'flying car' shots look a little bit off, but there are no effects here that pull me out of the film's world - which isn't something I can say of most older sci-fi films.
Part of the genius Scott and Production Designer Laurence G. Paull (also the Designer of "Back to the Future," another sci-fi film that has aged very well) is that they imagine a future in which by no means is everything 'futuristic' - there may be flying cars and synthetic animals and humans, but there's still old-fashioned booze, poverty and crumbling apartment buildings. The rising tide of technological progress and bio-engineering may have created wonders for the increasing number of humans living off-world, but much of the lives of those not so privileged remains only tangentially altered by technology here on Earth.
Wedded to the incredible detail of clothing, props, architecture and screen displays both tiny and gigantic are the elements of late '40's / early '50's style, lighting and design that make "Blade Runner"'s world truly succeed as 'neo-noir.' Harrison Ford's worn-down android hunter Deckard may face uniquely futuristic dangers and dilemmas but the way that he walks 'down the[...] mean streets' explored by Raymond Chandler is in many ways the same as Bogart's Sam Spade. Lights from passing airborne vehicles is always bursting through the windows and blinds of "Blade Runner"'s world, but it's as much a reminder of the darkness inside as it is a form of illumination.
What disappointed me this time around was that I didn't feel much of any real emotional connection to the story. I don't know the film's different versions well enough to say if this is a weakness of Scott's 'final cut' of the movie, but a lot of the 'poetic' moments the film lingers on and the increasingly out-there behavior of Rutger Hauer's chief replicant felt forced, even ridiculous at times. I have loved this film ever since seeing a 35mm print of the 'director's cut' in college, so I want to think that maybe I was in a bad mood or just overly familiar with the story. The narrative itself holds up just as well as it ever did, but I'd like to go back and visit that earlier cut again to see if I feel an emotional difference.
Whether it works for me emotionally or not, though, "Blade Runner" is a work of imaginative genius, one of the most perfect examples of a film creating the sense of a complete world that is different from our own, but feels just as real. This is the kind of film that makes a sci-fi lover like myself wish that the Ridley Scott who made this film - or a new filmmaker with the same level of talent and resources - was still creating the same kind of visionary work today.
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