In the future, though I guess now it’s possibly the present when development of the early models happens, man develops sophisticated androids called Replicants. They can think and resemble us perfectly. The latest model (definitely in the future now), the Nexus 6, is TOO advanced and some rebel. They are therefore deemed illegal and have to be terminated, or in PC style lingo “retired”.
Rick Deckard is a Blade Runner, a special kind of cop who retires replicants. He’s retired (not dead, just not working anymore) but when some escaped replicants are loose in LA he’s tasked with taking them down.
Got it? Now for some film blasphemy, I can’t really say I’m much of a fan. Don’t get me wrong, there’s things I like and things I don’t but on the whole I don’t quite get what the big deal is.
It’s just so…ploddy. Really slow. I’m a big fan of noir, I love cyberpunk, I love old school sci fi styling but on the important “enjoyable movie” notes this missed for me. It looks, I guess neo-noir would be a fitting term, but it doesn’t really FEEL noir to me. It might just be that I’m relatively inexperienced in what noir is exactly but I’d expect people to talk now and again. Deckard should be a bit more of a wise ass. There should be more detective work involved. What we have instead is an awful lot of lingering shots and big boughts of silence. And it might make me seem a bit thick, but I would have liked some more exposition rather than what seemed to be us having to know what was going on half the time without a teeny bit of spoon feeding. I can fill in the blanks, but not when there’s whole pages missing.
I was also hoping for a more Khan like bad guy in Rutger Hauer’s Roy. That’s possibly a failing in my part for having preconceptions. He’s more of a childish idiot with moments of brilliance. I would rather it was flipped the other way. A complete and utter genius, who acts like a nut job some of the time.
And is it just me or does the love story between Deckard and Rachael come across as her having Stockholm Syndrome to some extent? When they first have some actual passion between the two of them it like he’s raping her. Really didn’t sit right.
I’ll say this though, I did enjoy the look. I LOVE the fact that older sci fi is a strange mix of futuristic as hell and massively out dated. Giant techno pyramids and floating blimp billboards, but monitors are green screen and all machines sound like a teletype. No one has a mobile, but phones are all video phones for some reason and there’s giant billboards with Japanese women doing weird shit. GREAT!
It looks a LOT like an anime movie. And it’s shot that way too, with long lingering shots that I do generally enjoy. The problem is that scenes in between have to have dialogue going on…
Also, Deckard buys Tsingtao beer. I can recommend that, it’s really nice.
So while I may be committing movie geek blasphemy, count me out on the Blade Runner kool aid. Didn’t really do it for me. And I’m with Harrison Ford and Rutger Hauer, Deckard isn’t a replicant. It makes absolutely no sense for him to be one as I’d assume there would be some testing before someone could become a Blade Runner.
Oh and that’s one last thing. Until the last 20 minutes or so the replicants on the run don’t seem to have heard of Deckard. I’d assume that if they pulled him out of retirement, he hints that there are others, he must be the biggest and baddest of them all. Shouldn’t his name be whispered in the dark to scare new replicants to be good? Shouldn’t they be terrified of him?
Just some thoughts…
Next up: The Baader-Meinhof Complex
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2 comments:
I put Blade Runner with Citizen Kane.
Kane isn't enjoyable or even interesting to watch, as far as story or character is concerned.
It's considered an important film because of all of the film magic that Welles "invented."
(He'd been an illusionist, and used much of that craft as a director.)
So, directors and film snobs drool over Kane and miss that it's rather dull.
When Christopher Nolan got his cast and crew together to make Batman Begins, he showed them all Blade Runner, and then said,
"That's how we're gonna make Batman."
If you watch the pilot to Firefly, or the related movie Serenity, you can see Blade Runner rather obviously in Joss's visuals.
So, like Kane, I think it's a movie that has far more importance to directors and related creatives (set dressers, effects guys, model maker, etc).
Blade Runner does have such a legendary status today that people forget it was a three-way failure when it was new, and only got audience on video tape (by three way, I mean the critics hated it, it was a box-office flop (so the public either didn't like it or didn't care, and Hollywood (including people who worked on it) didn't like it either).
I've got mixed feelings on it.
I was a big fan of the book, and I hated the movie when I first saw it, because they threw away the major plot of the book and much of the touchstones of it, for something rather slight.
I also get pissed whenever Hollywood moves a book set in San Francisco to a movie set in L.A.
I have the 5-disc set, now. I love learning about filmmaking. All that behind-the-scenes stuff, so I guess I enjoy it more in the context of film history than for actually enjoying the movie, as opposed to say, Princess Bride, which I can watch over and over for the fun of the film.
I enjoyed reading the behind the scenes trivia on IMDB more than a fair bit of the movie tbh. I'm all for making film advances, but not at the cost of story and performance.
I did see that this was a troubled production, and you can see the number of drafts it must have gone through before it hit the screen. I think I'll probably like the making of more than the film itself though not because of all the termoil.
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