Blade Runner (1982)
IMDb meta-data is a runtime of 1 hour and 57 minutes, rated 8.1 by 778,000 cinematizens.
Genre: Sy Fy noir.
Verdict: all show, no go
Tagline: Eye candy
So many plot holes, so little time.
Let’s start where it does: 2019. As prophecy it starts with a failure. Los Angeles has its downsides but none such as shown here. A future LA would surely be Hispanic not Japanese/Chinese/Korean. While Edward Olomos is there to represent the Latino cause, this fine actor is wasted with a few lines and the inconsistent, and distracting, use of a cane. He did not need that cane on the Galatica, now did he.
There is no doubt the prime interest in the film, both in production and viewing, is the eye candy. The detailed sets are, well, detailed, but when all is said and done that adds zero to plot or character.
Speaking of character. They all seem like automatons. Rachel suggests Deckard take his own test in a throw-away line. Right on! He seems as mechanical as the others, going through the motions because…he has no choice, an automaton who doesn’t know it! If not, then why is there no choice. Did someone lose that script page about free will?
If twenty questions is the norm, as Deckard said, why did he continue up to a hundred with Rachel? [Because the script said so.] There is no interior logic, to paraphrase Max Weber.
While we are apparently to sympathise, if not identify, with the replicants, I kept wondering about the twenty humans they had killed in escaping. In this I was apparently alone, because no else seemed interested. While the cops want them caught, the cops do not want them caught badly enough to do anything about it themselves, apart from commissioning Deckard as a bounty hunter. What bounty is that?
Nor do these mass murderers ever resort to weapons.
By the way, how does Deckard make a living when not in movies? Sulking? Can’t be much money in that.
Rutty is just as underwritten. At least twice he waxes on about the things he has seen, but we get no idea of what those might have been, or why we should care, or, even, why he cares, that is, if he does. Do droids have cares? Did the scriptwriter like the line and put it in for no other reason. So it seems.
Given the incoherence of the screenplay, the acting is all the more impressive, even if it serves no purpose.
The version I watched this time is labeled as the Director’s Cut. Oh dear. He needs an editor who knows how to use the machine to splice film. Some of the cuts are mid-dialogue, mid-sentence, and in one instance mid-word, others are blunt and out of sequence it seemed to his naif.
Like many big productions, there is little in the story and much in the posturing. Though they feel no pain, the replicants are sentient and intelligent, do they then have rights? How do they differ from Sebastian’s toys? Are they vacuum cleaners with feelings? Do they meet the McNaughton Criterion? (Look it up.) That is one underlying issue that is never aired. Philip Dick’s story turns on these questions, which are here buried under bizarre makeup and detailed street scenes. Nor, by the way, is there ever any explanation of the title. Why is a replicant hunter called a blade runner? Why not a Repli-Collector or a Repcol or ….
None of this puts me in mind to watch the Tarkovsky-length Blade Runner 2049 (2017) which will probably be 2 hours and 44 minutes of mayhem.