Blade Runner: movie remarkable chiefly for visual impact and theme

Ridley Scott, “Blade Runner” (1982)

The curious thing with this movie is that as it recedes back in time – 2012 will be its 30th anniversary! – it appears less science fiction and more film noir in spite of its subject matter: a specialist police officer known as a blade runner comes out of retirement and is given a mission to hunt down and execute four half-human / half-machine beings or “replicants” that have hijacked a space-ship in and returned to Earth. Certainly the emphasis on atmosphere and a dark, downbeat mood throughout the film has always been very strong but now even little details like ceiling fans in rooms, derelict buildings in crowded cities and people puffing away on cigarettes, which to some viewers might seem quaint or contradictory, add an extra touch to the pessimistic mood. As the science fiction appears less incredible and more possible, “Blade Runner” now emerges as a futuristic film noir piece with a distinctive visual style. Once viewers become accustomed to the movie’s look and the backgrounds, the movie’s plot appears as threadbare with dialogue so spare the storyline nearly collapses. The characters are not nearly as fleshed out as they should be as a result. All that is left is a long movie with a pace so slow that any sense of tension drags away. The pivotal confrontation between the blade runner cop Deckard (Harrison Ford) and the rogue replicant leader Roy Batty (Rutger Hauer) seems very drawn out and its climax is too brief by comparison.

The movie does look beautiful with its vision of a futuristic Los Angeles as a chaotic, crowded city where different and often contradictory, even retrogressive ways of life co-exist with sophisticated technology. Scenes often appear in a hazy blue light and there is plenty of interplay between intense light and dark shadowy interiors in various parts of the movie which encourages a sense of paranoia and dread. Society as it appears in “Blade Runner” is highly stratified: the wealthy have moved to colonies in outer space where their needs are attended to by replicant slaves, the poor eke out a living as best as they can on Earth but mind their own business and aren’t bothered much by the authorities who carry out regular aerial patrols. The suggestion is of an all-seeing police state, confident in its stability to the extent that it feels no need to regiment and order the little people who scurry about like rats. The rebel replicants are able to insinuate themselves among the population as circus performers or beggars, all the while trying to gain entry into the massive Tyrell Corporation building and to beg their creator to give them more life before their 4-year guarantee wears out.

And why do the replicants only have a lifespan of four years? As police supervisor Bryant (M Emmett Walsh) explains to Deckard, this is to prevent the replicants from acquiring emotions and a desire for independence. What is implied is that if beings that are half-human and half-machine can rebel, then full human beings might be inspired to rebel as well. Bryant’s threat to Deckard if he refuses his mission suggests Deckard is as much a slave of his society as the replicants are. When viewers first meet Deckard, he seems lethargic and burnt-out in his retirement, with no enthusiasm for life; we presume his work as a blade runner has disgusted him and dehumanised him in some way. Indeed, later in the film when he flushes out replicant Zhora (Joanna Cassidy) and kills her, the experience exhausts him as Bryant comments when he comes to see the corpse. The point made here, which many fans of “Blade Runner” may have missed, is that the police state has made humans like Deckard less than human and reduced them to the level of replicants; the irony is that the replicants, in seeking more life, are seeking to be more human than humans themselves are allowed to be.

An even greater irony is that it is the replicants themselves, in particular Batty and Rachel (Sean Young), modelled on the niece of the head (Joe Turkel) of Tyrell Corporation, who restore humanity to Deckard. The subplot in which Deckard falls in love with Rachel and teaches her to love him (an idea likely borrowed from Jean-Luc Godard’s “Alphaville”, also a dystopian sci-fi / noir film) is important to Deckard’s reawakening as a human as it is for Rachel in learning how to be human. The division between replicant and human becomes irrelevant but in teaching love and trust to Rachel, Deckard puts her life in danger and so in the film’s coda, they flee his apartment. (In the original cinema release in the United States and Australia, the coda was a happy one that provided definite closure to the film’s events and was ironically closer to the “Alphaville” ending.) Deckard’s love for Rachel is paralleled by the open affection and love the replicants Batty and Pris (Daryl Hannah) express in their brief time together on screen.

Ford underplays his role as Deckard, as is appropriate for a character long out of touch with his emotions and what it means to be human; he rediscovers his humanity gradually through his encounters with Rachel and Batty. Rachel reawakens his capacity for love and Batty teaches him how to feel physical pain again and how to fear for his life. By film’s end, with his humanity restored, Deckard is finally able to crack a smile when he finds the origami unicorn left behind at his apartment by his police minder Gaff (Edward James Olmos) to indicate that the police know that Rachel is hiding inside and that they know that when he dreams, his mental processes are being monitored by the authorities. The conventional interpretation of the origami unicorn scene and its relation to the unicorn dream that Deckard has had earlier in the film – and this is supported by director Ridley Scott himself – has been that Deckard himself must be a replicant and the dream was implanted into his brain just as Rachel’s childhood memories are implants. If that’s so, then Gaff himself might also be a replicant – how else would he know of Deckard’s dream? – and by implication, so must Bryant. The whole rationale for “Blade Runner” falls over: if replicants aren’t allowed to be on Earth, then why is Deckard working there as a blade runner in the first place if he’s a replicant too? An alternative explanation is that the all-pervasive surveillance technology is sophisticated enough that the regular aerial patrols are “reading” people’s mental processes when they are asleep and able to capture any images generated and relay them to the police. This explanation reinforces the view of “Blade Runner” that society in the future will be ruled by a police state highly dependent on technology that not only spies on people but moulds them physically and mentally; it also continues the paranoid ambience of the film right to the end.

Of the other actors, Hauer plays his role as Batty subtly, sometimes child-like and sometimes authoritative and menacing, in the manner of a fallen angel, a motif used frequently with variations in connection with the character throughout the film. Emotions flit across his face and sometimes he inclines his head shyly as if playing at being an innocent, which in some respects he is. His final soliloquy at the film’s climax is very moving though viewers do have to pinch themselves to remember that the speech might be an implant. Young perhaps seems one-dimensional as a femme fatale stereotype who is also an innocent victim of the corporate police state created and sustained by her uncle in part and who needs to be saved and freed from that state to become “human”.

The background texture of the movie, against which the anti-hero Deckard chases the replicants, is the most outstanding feature: the society seems more fully realised here than in most other science fiction movies set in a future dystopia and the theme of what it means to be human and when does someone become human or non-human plays out well. The flimsy plot does allow the background to protrude into viewers’ awareness more than a complicated story with many twists  would. The dialogue could have been bulked a bit more to make Deckard and Rachel’s romance more credible. “Blade Runner” remains a standard by which science fiction film and television should be judged for visual impact and the way it portrays a police state in operation; it’s a pity that the plot doesn’t quite meet the standard of its background context.