- The other day, I accidentally found myself on the receiving end of a brief tirade by a fellow professor on the evils of the entertainment industry. While there are sensible arguments to be made along those lines, the one he chose instead focused on the notion that movies, and more explicitly fictional effects-heavy projects, are worthless. It took me a few seconds to scroll through a lengthy mental list of inappropriate responses ("You're the least well-informed creature I've ever spoken to, and I sometimes talk to dogs") before graciously attempting to reach common ground by admitting that there is not necessarily a correlation between the quality of a film and the quantity of special effects deployed therein. He was probably talking about visual effects anyway, but I considered the fact that he walked out of the lunchroom with his head intact a milestone of personal diplomacy.
- Is it a coincidence that I found myself watching Blade Runner just days after this conversation? Here is one of the clearest demonstrations that an unabashedly fictional film replete with effects can be not only worthwhile but also wonderful and culturally significant. Another such film is 2001: A Space Odyssey, and it's no coincidence that the legendary Douglas Trumbull was the special effects supervisor for both films. Now, I know that in real life flying cars, towering ziggurats, offworld colonies, and renegade androids will not dominate the cultural milieu of Los Angeles by 2019. But unlike said professor, I also know that a story about such things can shed a novel and completely fascinating light on economic power structures, human rights, the future of technology, and nothing less than what it means to be alive. To watch such films and not be taken by their visual and thematic beauty is to utterly miss the point of film and probably everything else. But I digress.
- Ridley Scott's Blade Runner deals with a man named Deckard (Harrison Ford) whose job as a "blade runner" is to hunt down rogue androids when they run loose on Earth. As the prologue informs us, the androids are known as "replicants" and their deaths are euphemistically referred to as "retirement." The audience doesn't know much more than that before meeting Leon (Brion James), a replicant whose test-taking goes badly enough that he blasts a hole in his interviewer (Morgan Paull) after only a few questions. Is it just me, or did that interviewer look and sound a lot like Harrison Ford? Nevertheless, the test, which employs a strangely antiquated-looking device to measure involuntary physiological responses to surreal questions, is designed to identify replicants, and it certainly found Leon. Now Deckard gets called in by the hard-selling police captain (M. Emmet Walsh) and his taciturn origami-folding lieutenant (Edward James Olmos) to retire Leon and his three confederates.
- Did I mention that all of this plays out like a rain-soaked, shadow and neon light-laden futuristic film noir? Deckard is obviously the reluctant anti-hero detective, and his corresponding femme fatale is a woman named Rachael (Sean Young), whom Deckard quickly determines is a replicant herself. Dr. Tyrell (Joe Turkel), the powerful man at the head of the replicant-building organization, keeps Rachael as a personal assistant, seemingly amused by the fact that her artificially-implanted memories prevent her from realizing that she's a robot. Of the remaining fugitives, Zhora (Joanna Cassidy) tries to keep a low profile as an exotic dancer while Pris (Daryl Hannah) and the ringleader Roy (Rutger Hauer) work on trying to get to Dr. Tyrell through an artificial eye engineer (James Hong) and a prematurely aging eccentric (William Sanderson) whose interests in toys and chess probably aren't far removed from his work for the Tyrell Corporation. Obviously, this is a film that, like its Philip K. Dick source material, has a lot of ideas and isn't afraid to deploy them all.
- Unlike many of Philip K. Dick's novels, however, Blade Runner never feels overstuffed. Instead, the film perfectly coordinates its immense creativity with jaw-dropping effects and set designs to depict a future where Earth has, quite simply, inherited the leftovers. The rich, healthy people have already departed for the blimp-advertised offworld colonies, leaving strange toymakers to occupy the decaying Bradbury building all by themselves. In a dystopia like this, you may not even know you're a replicant, a notion one suspects is at the heart of Deckard's constant inebriated brooding. The film's engrossing themes are only overshadowed by its amazing visuals that combine excellent greenscreen work with L.A. landmarks and backlot sets to create what has probably become the most plagiarized depiction of the future in modern television and film. The film does so many things right that I don't even have room to elaborate upon Vangelis' amazing electronic soundtrack or the rich characterizations of the film's artificial lifeforms. In the end, all I can say is that Blade Runner has convinced me that there really should be a test to determine whether humans are real or not. If somebody doesn't like it, they don't pass.
- Based on Do Androids Dream of Electric Sheep? by Philip K. Dick.
- There's plenty of trivia, but I have to note that Edward James Olmos' Hungarian translates to "Horse dick! No way. You are the Blade...Blade Runner."
