- Directed by Ridley Scott
- Written by Hampton Fincher and David Peoples, based on the novel Do Androids Dream of Electric Sheep? by Philip K. Dick
- Starring
- Harrison Ford
- Rutger Hauer
- Sean Young
- Edward James Olmos
- Daryl Hannah
I had absolutely no intention of reviewing this movie as part of the Rutger Hauer Video Binge. It’s not just a good movie; it’s a well-known good movie, and that means that its history, its subtext, its design and prognostication, its ethical and philosophical ramifications have been thoroughly chewed over by academics and fanboys alike; is there anything yet unsaid for someone like me to say, who normally contents himself with discussing movies that nobody’s bothered to discuss yet?
But then I saw the Director’s Cut DVD available at the local branch of the county library. Hey, free movie!
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The future’s almost here! Where the hell’s my flying car? |
Probably the greatest compliment paid to this movie was by Philip K. Dick. The movie was originally based on Dick’s novel Do Androids Dream of Electric Sheep? (his credit comes in the closing credits crawl, not in the opening credits), and as successive drafts drifted further and further from his novel, not just in terms of plot points but the thematic underpinnings as well, Dick was quite vocal in the fan community about his disapproval. What’s less well-known these days is that Dick, who died before the movie was released, did get a chance to see a rough cut of the movie, and came out expressing grudging admiration. It wasn’t HIS story, he said, but it was a good one nonetheless.
The setting is Los Angeles in 2019 which, if it’s going to look anything like this by that time, had better get cracking. It’s a sprawl of overlapping technology and commercialism, crowded and fractured by a hundred different ethnicities rubbing shoulders. The industrial design work (most notably by Syd Mead) puts Blade Runner at the head of a series of innovative principles in science fiction cinema: From the functional-looking design of 2001: A Space Odyssey which dispensed with the chrome-and-gleaming-spires futurism of earlier movies, to the used and jerry-rigged detail of Star Wars, and now to the jousting influences of technology, advertising, and disparate cultural sensibilities of Blade Runner, with just enough of a retro ’40s motif to give the movie a hardboiled aftertaste without overplaying it. The visual innovation here can be measured in part by “the Halloween effect,” as dozens of films since have tried to echo the impact of Blade Runner by rendering overcrowded, overcommercialized futures a dime a dozen. But Blade Runner was the first, and it’s still the best.
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“Maybe if we just tried to look a little less sinister… Naah.” |
And in the middle of all of this is the massive pyramidal headquarters of the Tyrell Corporation, which has made its fortune from replicants. “Replicants” (or “skin jobs”) are the new slavery: Organic robots, designed to be nearly indistinguishable from humans. Because of some previous “troubles” with replicants on Earth, their use has been limited to the Offworld colonies (again: better get cracking). But now a small cadre of replicants in the Nexus Six line — the most intelligent and advanced, naturally — have made a break toward Earth, and four of them have managed to vanish into the teeming street of LA.
We meet the first one, Leon (Brion James), at the Tyrell Corporation itself, where he has insinuated himself as a worker. Security has randomly instituted a set of tests for new hires, hoping to catch any of the replicants trying to sneak in: The Voight-Kompff test, which monitors physical responsese to probing questions — specifically, those that arouse empathy. That, apparently, is the one area in which the artificial humans are insurmountably different from the real ones; the Voight -Kompff reveals replicants’ distinct lack of appropriate empathic responses. Unfortunately, the psychologist administering the test to Leon doesn’t think to take precautions against what might happen if one of the employees he interviews IS a replicant, and gets himself blasted through the wall for his troubles.
In desperation, the city turns to a retired “Blade Runner” (anti-replicant cop), Rick Deckard (Harrison Ford), who is reluctantly strong-armed by Captain Bryant (M. Emmett Walsh) and his minder-goon Gaff (Edward James Olmos) into saddling up again. All he’s got are the names and descriptions of the four surviving replicants, and Leon’s last known address.
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“Isn’t ANYBODY here from the Midwest??” |
But first, to get up to speed on this latest generation of Nexus replicants, he visits the Tyrell Corporation, where Mr. Tyrell (Joe Turkel) himself tries not to crow too loudly about the capabilities of the Nexus Six — “More human than human.” Tyrell also asks to see the Voight-Kompff test in action, and volunteers his assistant Rachel (Sean Young) as a control test. It takes Deckard over a hundred questions, instead of the usual thirty, to reach a surprising conclusion: Rachel is a replicant — and doesn’t know it. As Tyrell explains once Rachel is dismissed, the trick is memories, in Rachel’s case implanted ones from Tyrell’s own niece. Replicants are adults without a childhood; the false memories act as a “cushion” for experimental models such as Rachel.
And that explains why, when Deckard examines Leon’s apartment, he finds a drawer full of old photographs, an attempt to create a surrogate past from other people’s memories.
The replicants truly evoke sympathy, even as they act out violently. Not only do they have no past, but they have no future, thanks to planned obsolescence: They’re designed with a four-year lifespan, supposedly to keep them from developing independent personalities beyond those inherent in their design. That obviously didn’t work, so instead we have four individuals who are seeking some mechanism to extend the lives they’ve barely experienced, while also taking revenge upon the people who made them this way, like Frankenstein’s monster.
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2019, and they still haven’t invented mascara that doesn’t run. |
Yes, there are action scenes, and darned good ones at that; each of the replicants is a physically perfect specimen, with Roy Batty (Rutger Hauer), engineered as a soldier, the most formidable of all. But between the chases and firefights are the scenes that truly make the movie sing: Conversations and meditations which skirt the edges of memory and humanity, skirting because delving right into them would evoke too much cognitive dissonance. Rachel is the most pathetic figure by far; twenty-four hours ago, she simply thought she was a person like everybody else. Suddenly, she is forced to accept that, though she still feels as human as ever she did, she is a thing. An object. An experiment, and everything she thought of as being her is not her at all. It’s an identity crisis of staggering proportions. We humans are so much the product of our experiences; without the memory of those experiences — or with the knowledge that those memories lie to us about experiences we never had — who can we honestly say that we are?
Of course, a good hard look at the premise leads to the inescapable conclusion that none of this would have happened if the Tyrell Corporation weren’t a bunch of idiots. If it behooves us to be able to distinguish readily between natural and artificial persons, shouldn’t there be some means of doing so that doesn’t rely on a lengthy interview? Certainly an indelible genetic “tattoo” down the side of the neck wouldn’t mar the finished product too much, even in the case of a pleasure model like Pris (Darryl Hannah). At the very least, how about a genetic marker that stands out readily with a quick blood test? And if the Voight-Kompff is the only means of detecting a replicant, why would Tyrell’s research be toward creating a replicant which can fool the test? What is to be gained by creating artificial people who are closer and closer psychologically to the real thing, giving them ample motivation for raging against those who created them as slaves? I can almost accept that a combat model such as Roy Batty would need untrammeled intelligence and insight to be the best of soldiers, but whom does it serve to install in a pleasure model like Pris the capacity for introspection, self-loathing, and dissatisfaction with the shackles of her design? When designing the perfect slave, wouldn’t the first consideration be that the slave doesn’t mind being a slave? These are questions which couldn’t practically be answered, because if they were, the story would collapse.
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“Hi! Hi — Oh, they’re not waving to me.” |
But such considerations scarcely mar the movie. What can more effectively sink it is the retconning in fandom in the past twenty years to the effect that Deckard himself is a replicant. That’s the kind of concept that’s more worthy of studio execs desperately seeking a hook for a sequel, or comic book publishers trying to wring more interest out of a property with a shocking twist. If Deckard were a replicant, it would destroy the thematic heart of the movie, the blurred lines between human and replicant, because NONE of the major characters would have been human. There are even quotes from Ridley Scott, long after the fact, that Deckard was indeed supposed to be a replicant. I hope that such ideas are indeed revisionism after the fact (Harrison Ford vehemently denies that Deckard was meant to be anything but human); if Scott had truly envisioned Deckard as a replicant during filming, then this is one of those cases in which a director’s “pure” vision is made more satisfying by producer interference.
Some Notable Totables:
- body count: 7 (yes, I do count replicants)
- breasts: 2
- explosions: 1
- dream sequences: 1
- ominous thunderstorms: 3
- dwarfs: 7
- actors who’ve appeared on Star Trek: 1
- Joanna Cassidy (Zhora) played “T’Les” on a couple of recent episodes of Enterprise
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