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We
recently watched, again, the classic Blade Runner…and
marveled at how well it has aged, or hasn't! Ridley Scott's
1982 film set in 2019 Los Angeles is all mood. But merely
mood can become maudlin, purposeless…instead, mood here is
integral and finely woven into the very fabric of the film:
script, characters, visuals, music, layers of meaning are all part
of the haunting aesthetic that permeates, or is, the
film.
The
sharp noir-meets-science-fiction script, the stylized cast of
characters that are all finely delineated archetypes conveying
worlds of meaning with the most minimal of gestures, the barest of
lines. It is, when one thinks of it, a marvelous exercise in
minimalism. Harrison Ford is trench-coat wearing and
raffishly handsome blade runner Roy Deckard; there is the
beautiful Rachael (Sean Young) who might be a replicant but
believes she is human; a foppish Gaff (Edward James Olmos)
who is with the police and given to making origami creatures; and a
coldly efficient Roy Batty who stops to make poetic declamations (Rutger
Hauer).
The
mood is darkly beautiful: stylish and stylized, the night and rain
are atmospheric, a Los Angeles where neon glows through the steam
that wafts like slow-burning poetry, large electronic billboards
that advertise emigration to off-world colonies, a babel of
languages below, architecture that has something heavy and
Egyptian about it, the romantic, futuristic music by
Vangelis. And beneath all this, the mille-feuille of
metaphysics, meditations on what it is to be human: emotion,
empathy, memory, life, death, love. Roy
Deckard is out on a assignment to terminate a band of Nexus 6
replicants, genetically engineered beings who are used as
off-world slaves. 6 of them have escaped and are trying to
find a way to get around their built-in lifespan of 4 years;
the script is inexorable - adventure, love-story, science-fiction
seamlessly collaged.
Dark
poetry, recurring images of eyes, the very large, dark, and quite beautiful
eyes of Rachael brimming with tears, the icy blue eyes of Rutger
Hauer, the watching eyes of an owl that is artificial, a visit to
an eye factory; the idea of sight, of seeing, of rain, and tears
woven into a silent song.
Perhaps
the most famous lines from the film:
I've
seen things you people wouldn't believe
Attack ships on fire off the shoulder of Orion
I've watched C-beams glitter in the dark near the Tannhäuser Gate
All those... moments will be lost in time... like... tears... in
rain
We
prefer the Director's Cut, a version without the Harrison Ford
voiceover, but we missed the glorious ending of the original
version… The
script to Blade Runner was written by Hampton Fancher and
David Peoples and was loosely based on the novel Do Androids
Dream of Electric Sheep? by Philip K. Dick.
See:
Blade
Runner
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