Visions of the Future: Blade Runner (Dir Ridley Scott, 1h 57m, 1982)

 
There are a handful of films that have changed the shape of cinema and popular culture. Blade Runner is one of them. A minor success on its release, the film's power growing with its audience and a series of edited releases of the film reestablish the director, Ridley Scott's original vision, this culminating with 2007's Blade Runner: The Final Cut. Adapting Philip K Dick's dystopian science fiction novel, Do Androids Dream of Electric Sheep (1968), Blade Runner can be found everywhere; foremost is the literary genre that took Blade Runner's themes in myriad directions, beginning with William Gibson's Neuromancer (1984), the frontrunner in a movement dubbed "cyberpunk".

Cyberpunk, and Blade Runner itself, influenced, adapted or birthed countless films (including The Matrix and Akira) , comics and some Japanese manga, including Masamune Shirow's iconic, if intriguingly cerebral Ghost in the Shell, not to mention videogames, including the cult System Shock and Deus Ex, and even the RPG system, Cyberpunk. Even the world of design is touched by Blade Runner-the TESLA Cybertruck aping the designs of Syd Mears, whilst replicas of everything from the film's whiskey glasses to its pivotal origami unicorn exist-and Vangelis' electronic soundtrack, refracted in the hyper-post-modern world of vaporwave, at once recycling, homaging, and critiquing the Japanese-influenced aesthetics of the future Los Angeles and the Tokyo of 20XX.

Blade Runner, at heart is a noir film; Harrison Ford's detective, Rick Deckard (the film's original cut adds a voiceover from Ford that adds to this noir atmosphere but is otherwise clunky), is sent to track down and kill four escaped prisoners, near-human cyborgs called replicants, led by Roy Batty (Rutger Hauer); sent to the towering Tyrell Corporation, headed by Tyrell himself (Kubrick regular, Joe Turkel). Here, Deckard meets the film's femme fatale-coded heroine, Rachael (Sean Young), a young woman unaware she is a replicant, who becomes Deckard's confidant, and love interest, as Deckard's hunt for Batty and his fellow "skin-jobs" continues.

What is immediately apparent from the first few seconds of the film is Blade Runner is its jaw-dropping model, matte, and special effects work, headed by Mark Stetson on model work, the legendary Douglas Trumbull (another Kubrick alumni) and Richard Yuricich overseeing effects work, and art design headed by David Snyder. From its opening shot, a nearly three minute pull-in on the colossal hulking form of the Tyrell Corporation, Blade Runner has cast its spell. Its its five-minutes-into-the-future mix of Shibuya Crossing on steroids, and the dilapidated industrial north of England and inner-city Los Angeles, gouts of derrick fire punctuating the sprawl of 2019's Los Angeles as futuristic flying spinners sweep across it. The far east features heavily in Blade Runner's iconography, the film's defining shot, of a colossal billboard with a smiling Japanese woman on it one of dozens of moments where Japan and China and this future Los Angeles merge, with countless digitised advertisements strewn with kanji and Deckard eating noodles and drinking Chinese beer.

Juxtaposing this, even in its early, bowdlerised visions, is its visual debt to noir; Jordan Cronenweth's cinematography, and Lawrence G. Paull's production design walk a thin, but perfect line between evoking the officers of Bogard, Mitchem et al, the chiraosco, the Venetian blinds, the bottles of whiskey, and the futuristic. This extends to Ford and Young-remove the square tie and the pattern from the shirts and Rick Deckard becomes timeless, at home in the 1930s and 1940s as in the 2010s. This is to say nothing of Vangelis' score, his mix of synthesiser ambience and leads that imitate the swoop of a saxophone, occasionally breaking out into real brass, that captures at once the looming future, and the smoke-filled past of the noir.

Especially when shot on the streets of Los Angeles, in the driving, and nigh constant rain, Deckard cuts a figure straight out of the first heyday of noir, collar pulled up against the rain of this future Los Angeles. Rachael's entire costume and appearance bridge this gap even more effectively-the coiffured hair that later becomes loose, the 80s power suits that somehow become untethered from their decade of origin, the vamp-style smoking and demeanour, at once feel like the 1940s, the 1980s and the imagined 2010s. The replicants are a jarring intrusion into this timeless world, a mix of 80s New Romance, especially in the figure of Pris (Daryl Hannah), with kohled eyes and distinctly punkish fashion, and the leather jacketed Batty, his white shock of hair striking and distinctly 80s in a costume that otherwise resembles a noirish villain, a dark echo of Deckard's.

Their visual intrusion is reflected in their narrative one; their capture is Deckard's Blade Runner's central struggle, its examination of what it means to be human. The Tyrell Corporation, after all, markets itself and the Replicants as "more human than human", At the centre of Roy Batty's arrival back in Los Angeles, alongside his fellow replicants, most notably, Pris, a "pleasure model" who befriends the prematurely ageing J. F. Sebastian (William Sanderson) is a search for Tyrell, his creator. This co-opting of Frankenstein, this struggle between creator and creation, is further underlined by their impending mortality. The film reveals in its first few minutes, after the attack on a Tyrell employee by another of the group, the thuggish Leon (Brion James) that the replicants have only four years of life.

This imbues the taut sequences in which Batty confronts his creator, not just with the symbolism of a son coming face-to-face with his pseudo-father, but a man coming face-to-face with his creator, with all the dramatic weight that this involves. This is not to mention the curious relationship that Batty and Deckard, the hunted and the hunter, are involved with. Whilst much of this is down to Hauer's performance, especially in the latter half of the film, equal parts chilling villain and remarkably human foil to Deckard, it is down to the various director's cuts restoring short, but crucial scenes, that bring into question the Blade Runner's identity, blurring the division between them, and turning Blade Runner from a mere high-tech noir into one of the greatest science fiction films of all time.

Rating: Must See

Blade Runner: The Final Cut is available via streaming on AppleTV, and on DVD and BluRay from Warner Bros in the UK and via streaming on Apple TV, and on DVD from Warner Bros in the USA

Next week, James Cameron, Arnold Schwarzenegger, $6 million, and a time travelling cyborg from the future bent on destroying mankind's resistance create the intimidable The Terminator.

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