New Blade Runner re-ignites debates about the original

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This article was published 06/10/2017 (3209 days ago), so information in it may no longer be current.

As the much anticipated Blade Runner 2049 hits screens this weekend, it’s worth looking back to its initially misunderstood predecessor, which opened in 1982 to underperforming box office and mixed reviews.

Of course, Ridley Scott’s 1982 sci-fi masterwork, adapted by Hampton Fancher and David Peoples from a novel by Philip K. Dick, went on to enter the pop-culture pantheon as an essential film, one that over the decades has become more influential, more watched and more argued over.

And that last point is crucial. Though many of the early negative reviews complained about opaque themes and unanswered questions, that uncertainty has become the film’s greatest pull.

Blade Runner’s basic story is simple: Harrison Ford’s Rick Deckard, a cynical, hard-drinking ex-cop, is pulled in for one last job. He needs to hunt down four renegade “replicants,” androids capable of passing as human.

Beyond that, the film is mostly constructed out of dark, rain-drenched atmosphere and evocative ambiguity. Part of the reason film fans adore Blade Runner is because there’s so much to wrangle over.

Just to start off, movie geeks get to argue about which of the seven (seven!) versions is the authentic one, a fitting fight for a film obsessed with the notion of realness. Bonus feature: This argument allows cineastes to express their contempt for voiceover narratives, which they absolutely love to do.

Ultimately, the biggest question for Blade Runner fans involves Deckard’s status, the answer often depending on which of the film’s seven cuts the fan has committed to. Is Deckard a human, a replicant, or just Harrison Ford at his most emotionally withholding?

Just as important as the film’s murky philosophizing is its murky look. Even if you’ve never seen Blade Runner, you’ll recognize its vision of dystopia, which has permeated our pop-culture.

Blade Runner imagines Los Angeles in 2019, and as that date looms closer, discussions of its depiction of the future have become even more fraught and anxious. As usual with sci-fi, the film overpromised with the flying cars. But it gets a lot of things right.

Before Blade Runner, sci-fi films often envisioned the future as clean, bright and white, all one-piece silver jumpsuits and gleaming techno-minimalism. Blade Runner’s world is grotty, grey, crowded and retrofitted. This future doesn’t jettison the past. It cannibalizes it, from ancient ziggurats to Art Deco glamour. With the passing years, the film’s own contemporary style — think 1980s music videos and very big shoulder pads — has been folded into this postmodern visual panoply.

The movie is (depressingly) prescient with its extreme weather, presenting a megalopolis perpetually punished with biblical amounts of rain. (Of course, this could be eco-consciousness, but it might also be esthetics, all that water allowing genius cinematographer Roger Deakins to play around with rain and steam and neon lights gleaming in puddles.)

Blade Runner’s world has also been colonized by corporate interests, democratic governments having given way to the dictates of transnational, even trans-planetary capitalism. The production designers demonstrate an early understanding of how advertising will worm its way into our spaces and our heads, though they are a tad optimistic about the success of the Atari company.

This weekend, Blade Runner 2049 builds on this bleak foundation. Like the 1982 original, it’s almost drowning in dark visual style. It also looks to be more about questions than answers, and that’s good. It’s the perverse pleasures of uncertainty and anxiety that have kept film fans talking about the first Blade Runner for 35 years.

alison.gillmor@freepress.mb.ca