Blade Runner The Movie

Blade Runner
Rating: R
Leading Role: Harrison Ford, Rutger Hauer
Director: Ridley Scott
Genre: Drama-Science Fiction
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Theatrical release narration by Harison Ford

Based on a Philip K. Dick novel called Do Androids Dream of Electric Sheep?, Ridley Scott's Blade Runner is a futuristic film noir construct that, like the best of noir, ruminates on the identity of the hard-boiled detective.

Deckard is a "Blade Runner," a law enforcement official in 2025 Los Angeles that is enlisted in the "retiring" of rogue "replicants," cyborg entities that are indistinguishable from humans in appearance, though superior in strength and agility, and at least equal to the intelligence of their creators. Their only real weakness, in fact, is their three-year life span.

Created to act as workers in dangerous environments, as soldiers in distant conflicts, or as "pleasure" models for military installations - the new generation of replicants, to further simulate human emotions and reactions - have been implanted with sets of memories.

Asked to hunt down a small band of replicants that have revolted, stolen a shuttle, and crashed outside of L.A., Deckard is forced to examine the morality of his profession and, in the process, reflect on his own humanity.

Blade Runner is easily among the most lavish visual and aural productions in the history of film. So obsessed was Scott in establishing a completely immersive fiction that he went so far as to have the magazines on a newsstand that appears for less than one second on the screen all updated with different pictures and 2025 dates. For an exhaustive detailing of every imaginable piece of minutiae concerning every aspect of the two year production of Blade Runner, look to Paul Sammon's obsessive but brilliant, fifteen years in-the-making document Future Noir.

Added to the visual majesty is a new age score by Vangelis that is among the most replayed and emulated scores in science fiction. The soft, yearning of the compositions lend themselves to the sense of loss and sadness endemic to the decadence of Scott's caliginous metropolis.

In a role originally imagined for Dustin Hoffman, Harrison Ford plays Deckard as one of his "straighter" characters: lacking much of the sardonic humor that is indicative of his other genre work. Cast and filmed during production and post-production of Raiders of the Lost Ark, Blade Runner is blessed by Ford's intelligence and presence at the cusp of his superstardom.

Harrison Ford is a stellar choice to play the fallen noir anti-hero - a persona that his sharpness and sense of irony accommodates most comfortably. It is a latent quality about Ford that prompted Roman Polanski (responsible for one of the standard bearers of noir in Chinatown) to cast him in Frantic five years later.

Although rekindling the "Deckard as replicant" debate is probably tedious to fans of the film and redundant to detractors, the over-reaching concern of maintaining individualism and making human contact in the midst of a technocracy remains immediate and poignant to this day, eighteen years later. All the more so when one considers the booming of the internet and of the bizarre and sickly relationships born, fostered, and truncated all within the ephemera of cyberspace

What is often lost in surface debates concerning the true nature of the Deckard character, the (wholly unintentional) problem of having one extra missing replicant mentioned in the film than appears in the film (an early version of the script included a fifth replicant that acted like as a maternal figure), or the philosophical hair-pulling of Roy Batty's (Rutger Hauer) rescuing of the Deckard character - is that Blade Runner is that rare fiction that causes its audience to re-examine their lives according to a different paradigm.

It may be an unsophisticated thing to say about one of the most examined films of recent history, but Blade Runner is very simply a breath-takingly beautiful, devilishly complicated, and magnificently executed piece of science fiction that is ultimately about just how difficult it is to locate the human soul. It is a conceit that is as old as Decartes' statement about thought and existence, one that will no doubt be touched upon in Kubrick/Spielberg's upcoming A.I..

The strength of Blade Runner is not in the newness of its philosophy - but in the crystalline sublimnity of its implementation.

Ridley Scott's Blade Runner is a thoughtful, lovely, brooding meditation on the unbearable lightness of our beings, the unpredictable tensions of our mortal coils, and the malleable nature of reality. It is an introspective tale with a handful of exciting moments, an exquisitely haunted performance by one of our few screen icons, and one of the most poetic odes to love and courage in the face of entropy in our cinematic literature.

Press Information about the movie Blade Runner

Director Ridley Scott's hauntingly prescient vision of the not-too-distant future stars Harrison Ford as Rick Deckard, a retired police assassin, or "blade runner." The Los Angeles of 2019 is a dark, polluted, overcrowded dystopia dominated by cloud-piercing buildings and looming neon billboards, the air dense with acid rain and flying traffic. World-weary Deckard has been called out of retirement to liquidate four escaped "replicants"--genetically derived androids of great strength, intelligence, and nearly-human emotion who serve as slaves and prostitutes in the off-planet colonies. Led by Roy Batty (Rutger Hauer), they've come to Los Angeles to confront their designer, Eldon Tyrell (Joe Turkel), with their unhappiness about the brevity of their four-year life span. In the course of his search, Deckard becomes romantically entwined with Tyrell's lovely assistant, Rachael (Sean Young), and must eventually confront Batty in an unforgettable rain-soaked sequence.

A highly influential fusion of the science fiction and noir genres based on the novel DO ANDROIDS DREAM OF ELECTRIC SHEEP? by Philip K. Dick, this postmodern film boasts astonishingly rich art direction, juxtaposing ingenious technological gadgetry with yellowing photographs and fetishistic objets d'art as it touches on questions of time, memory, identity, and mortality. Different from Scott's 1992 director's cut, this widely released edition of the film, which features Ford's narration and an ending culled from footage of Stanley Kubrick's THE SHINING, remains the most well known version of this stunning cinematic landmark.

Credits
Producer: Michael Deeley
Cast: Brion James, Daryl Hannah, Edward James Olmos, Harrison Ford, James Hong, Joanna Cassidy, Joseph Turkel, Kao Thompson, Kevin Thompson, M. Emmet Walsh, Morgan Paull, Rutger Hauer, Sean Young, William Sanderson

Notes
Theatrical release: June 25, 1982.
BLADE RUNNER was added to the Library of Congress National Film Registry in 1993.
A reedited version of the film--Ridley Scott's director's cut--received a limited theatrical rerelease in 1992.

Editorial reviews
"...BLADE RUNNER is a classic that's as twisty as a Mobius strip..."
Entertainment Weekly - Entertainment Weekly Staff (05/23/2003)
"...With the dazzle and drizzle of Ridley Scott's dystopian cyber-city fusing with electric performances and a haunting thematic payload..."
Total Film - Daniel Webb (12/01/2003)
"[With a] striking post-modern design..."
Premiere - Premiere Staff (12/01/2003)

Awards
1982 Academy Awards, Best Art Direction - Set Decoration
1982 Academy Awards, Best Art Direction - Set Decoration: Linda DeScenna
1982 Academy Awards, Best Visual Effects
1982 Academy Awards, Best Visual Effects: Douglas Trumbull
1993 National Film Registry, Outstanding Film

The problem also becomes one of identity, which can be considered as being the sum of our memories. Often those who have lost their memory from illness or trauma are not able to "identify" themselves as they had prior to the change.

We all live in a "replicant" world to some degree. A world made up of unreliable memories. Ask any policeman and they will tell you that three people witnessing the same accident will tell three different stories.

How reliable is memory? A test by the U.S. Army and the University of Pennsylvania was done four times and the results were the same each time. The subjects were shown a short two-minute film. Then they were asked to describe the color of the dress the woman in the film was wearing. Some got it right and said she had on a blue dress, but some did not remember the correct color. The subjects were then hypnotised and to the suprise of the investigators none of the subjects changed their minds. Under hypnosis they just became more convinced of what they saw whether it was correct or not.

We leave the quetion of memory for another time, but if all that seperates us from replicants is real versus implanted memory, then who are you?