Blade Runner at…44?

Author’s Note: I just learned that Ridley Scott’s classic sci-fi film Blade Runner will be back in theaters this month (today, actually) in a limited release of the so-called “Final Cut” version. None of the participating theaters is near me, alas. So, instead of going, I thought I would re-post this tribute that I wrote some years ago. I hope you like it…

When Philip K. Dick was shown a rough cut of the classic movie Blade Runner a few months before his death in 1981, he was so amazed by the power of Ridley Scott’s vision that he said, “You would literally have to go five times to see it before you could assimilate the information that is fired at you.”

Dick might have been amused to know that I did go to see the movie five movies, when it was released in 1982—forty-four years ago. Ridley Scott might be amused, too, especially since I paid full price for every viewing, which means I am completely absolved of the dismal box office totals that the film accrued during that long-ago summer.

It’s hard to look back across so many years and try to remember what it was about the movie that captured my imagination so relentlessly. But I think it was simply this:  for the 117 minutes of the film’s running time, I was in that world.  I was completely immersed in that dark, crowded urban nightmare of some unknown future.

Yes, I said “unknown.”  The opening crawl says that the movie is set in Los Angeles of 2019, but it’s really set in Scott’s imagination—a dizzying collage of 1940s film noir mixed in with 1980s Ginza, Japan, with a  good dose of the Weimar Republic of 1930’s Germany thrown in for good measure. Oh, did I mention the Heavy Metal comic books?

Blade Runner was the first movie to actually pull-off this “collapsed time” effect, and it did so mainly thanks to Scott’s own obsessive genius for detail. It is perhaps the most dense visual landscape ever created on film.  Every time I saw it in the theater, I noticed different details, whole new layers that I had missed before. Like a dream, this movie really is bottomless.

It’s also just very, very smart.  1982 was a big year for science fiction movies—The Wrath of Khan came out that year, as did E.T. and Tron. I liked those movies (especially Khaaan!!!), but even as a kid, I knew that they were full of crap.  Blade Runner, despite being a movie about androids and flying cars and implanted memories, felt like the most realistic film I had ever seen.

Ironically, it’s one of the most human as well.  It’s a love story, after all. (Actually, it’s two love stories, if you count Pris and Sebastian.) I found myself caring about all the characters in the film, replicant and otherwise.  And despite the fact that he has pretty much disowned the film, Harrison Ford is the glue that holds it all together. Without his low-key, soulful performance as Deckard, the movie might have drowned in one of Scott’s magnificent sets.  Ford keeps the movie centered.

Of course, when I watch the movie now, as a middle-aged man, I notice other great things about the movie. As a writer, I am struck by its tautness, its almost total mastery over film time and space.  Contemporary directors should study it, if only as a brilliant demonstration of how to improve a film by leaving crap out.  Think of all the scenes we don’t see:  the  replicants escaping from the off-world colony; Tyrell telling Deckard about Rachel’s memory implants; Baty killing Sebastian.   All of this happens off-screen, and as a result we are never taken out of that vivid, meticulously imagined cityscape, (which, by the end of the movie, feels as real to me as my own hometown).   

There is also no junk dialogue—no thinly-veiled backstory or explication.  Scott seems to realize that the viewer is smart, and he asks us to keep up without a lot of summary.  As a result, there is hardly a false note in the movie (one exception being the interview scene with Bryant, which clunks in one or two places, through no fault of the great character actor M. Emmet Walsh).

I also love how the script, penned by Hampton Fancher and David Peoples, delivers so many genuine surprises.  My favorite moment, in fact, is one that I have never seen discussed at length in any tribute or essay.  It’s the moment when Deckard drunk-dials Rachel on the video phone in Taffy’s bar.  This gesture of neediness and naked humanity is totally unexpected. It seems to have nothing to do with the overall plot of the film. And yet it’s totally believable.

Very seldom does a director allow his film to venture off the rails like this. But Scott often does, with brilliant effect. It’s this kind of realism that gives his movies a totally different vibe than almost any other major-league filmmaker.

Anyway, here is my statement of thanks to Scott, Fancher, Peoples, and (of course) P. K. Dick. It was a great summer. I’m glad the rest of the world finally caught on.