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Ridley Scott bridles visibly when somebody refers to Blade Runner as "science fiction", and he'll sharply correct any interviewer who labels it as such. Apart from him being, by all accounts, a cantankerous git, I can understand why – being no fan of SF myself. Sometimes it's because the preposterous notions put forward as a feasible vision of the future stick in my craw. More often than not, though, it's because it's all too easy to use whiz-bang effects to gloss over a weak plot and cardboard cut-out characters. So don't paint Blade Runner with the same "sci-fi" brush - Ridley won't stand for it. What the man has created is a work of "futuristic fiction".
Los Angeles in 2019 is a very different place from the world of 1982, when the film was made. In the dystopian near-future envisioned by Philip K. Dick, who wrote the source novel "Do Androids Dream of Electric Sheep?", the planet has become a victim of our excesses. Constant rain falls on decaying cities and radioactive fallout makes much of the world uninhabitable. Most able-bodied citizens have left in search of a better life in off-world colonies. Those who remain on Earth are either the maimed and disfigured, the decadent ultra-rich or denizens of the underworld. And in this soup of reeking humanity we find Rick Deckard (a young Harrison Ford), Blade Runner - a cop with the job of exterminating rogue androids.
Replicants are humanoid robots created so perfectly through modern technology and genetic engineering that they are indistinguishable from people – "more human than human" is the motto of the Tyrell Corporation. The unfortunate side effect of their physical and mental perfection is that they spontaneously develop emotions and start wanting unacceptable benefits – freedom, for one. And a normal lifespan, for another. When a gang of replicants (Daryl Hannah being one of them) escapes to LA in search of these ideals, Deckard is sent to "retire" them.
What's the difference between this premise and science fiction? Well for one, science isn't the essence of the story. Quite the opposite, in fact: it's really about humanity – how we define it and how we deny it. It's something Philip K. Dick achieves particularly well in his speculative fiction: taking a hypothetical scenario and using it to explore themes that resonate in contemporary society.
At the time of the film's release, though, audiences didn't know what the hell to make of it. Neither action-adventure flick nor sci-fi love story, their first introduction to cyberpunk in all its gritty glory left them confused and disturbed. For those who did see the film and grok its gut-wrenching magnitude, however, it became a cult phenomenon. Here's the thing about cult films, though. Part of what defines them as such is precisely that they never crack a major audience. And another side of it is that viewers tend to form an intense personal bond with the work.
My love affair with Blade Runner goes back well into childhood. It is one of the earliest film memories I have, falling somewhere between The Jungle Book (1967) and Footloose (1984) – Baloo and Kevin Bacon bookend a vivid recollection of Roy Batty pushing a spike through his own hand. Although I was too young to see it in the movie house on its original run, we rented it on VHS a couple of years later. My brother and I borrowed a friend's VCR, made ourselves a lo-fi copy, and in the years that followed we must have worn that tape through.
My relationship with the movie continued and blossomed into adolescence, as I started comprehending the philosophical question at its core: what does it mean to be human? My very first foray on the Internet was back in 1993, when my brother snuck me into his campus computer room to show me this newfangled virtual network. Oblivious to its futuristic appropriateness, the first thing I did was find a Usenet group devoted to discussing Blade Runner and added my two cents on the most fiercely debated point in the film (but I won't spoil it for you here). Recently I tried to find this post of mine from 15 years ago, to see if my digital footprint had been archived somewhere. But no, that moment has been lost in time, like tears in rain (that one's for you, fanboys).
A few things have contributed to Blade Runner's longevity and thus assured its permanent membership in the film canon. Firstly, there's the production design, which looked like nothing ever seen before on celluloid. Before Ridley Scott directed feature films, he made 2 500 commercials (a couple of years later he did the Orwellian masterpiece that was the first ad for the Apple Mac: http://youtube.com/watch?v=d29mff8mEeo) and worked as a production designer. It shows. Every frame of this film bears Scott's signature, from the towering neon billboards to the Frank Lloyd Wright-tiled apartment. It's a visual mash-up of cities like Tokyo, New York and Hong Kong, retrofitted with jury-rigged tech, overlaid with grime, then rain, then smog, then light pollution, and decayed all the way through until the seething mess stops just short of reeking off the screen. The effect is mesmerising and jarringly different to the slick spaceships (I'm looking at you, Stanley Kubrick), space opera (hi there, George Lucas) and cuddly extraterrestrials (et tu, Steven Spielberg) previously associated with the genre. In fact, Blade Runner owes far more to film noir than science fiction; Harrison Ford's Deckard is more hardboiled Robert Mitchum than Han Solo, and there isn't a femme fatale on the screen that Sean Young's Rachael couldn't out-smoke, out-pout and out-cool. Significantly, there's barely a futuristic film of the earth-bound variety created since then that doesn't owe a debt of gratitude to Ridley Scott (Fifth Element [1997], anyone?), and a few that really ought to give the man a Production Designer credit (Minority Report [2002], you didn't get away with it. And George Michael, guilty as charged.) Add to this a haunting score by Vangelis and you've got a film to stand the test of time.
The second reason that the film still finds new audiences is that a number of versions have been released. The film's producers, fearing that the movie was too dense for the public at the time of its debut, insisted on Harrison Ford recording a voiceover to explain certain scenes – and they erred on the side of stupid. They also tacked on a happy ending to mitigate the suffocating darkness of the movie, at a stroke demolishing Scott's carefully constructed noir. In 1992, however, he finally got a chance to release the film in his Director's Cut – which ditched the voiceover, kept the ending ambiguous and inserted a five-second scene which raises an astounding question (again, I'll avoid spoiling it). And finally, late last year, the Final Cut was released – digitally remastered, with cleaned-up special effects and a new lease on life in High Definition. Other than that, though, it's essentially the same film as the Director's Cut. What makes the DVD worthwhile is the exhaustive documentary Dangerous Days, which gives a glimpse of the nightmare involved in shooting for 50 nights in the rain – and how close this movie was to never being released.
Perhaps another reason that Blade Runner is still so highly regarded is that as the various re-cuts have emerged, a new crop of viewers discovered the film – and for these later viewers it's no longer so far ahead of its time. Only an audience familiar with the unraveling of the human genome, stem-cell research debates, genetic engineering backlash, aggressive climate change and other realities of the 21st century can truly appreciate how plausible this particular nightmare of the future is.
As for myself, I hope Ridley Scott is finally done tinkering with his misunderstood love child and lets it age gracefully. There are enough of us who are still blown away every time we see Blade Runner to ensure that it has no expiration date.
