What is so great about Blade Runner? [spoiler alert] (editor, documentary, actors)
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I'm not sure if you could call Blade Runner an expansion of the short story Do Androids Dream of Electric Sheep.
I would not.
Largely because Blade Runner is a great story. Very emotionally moving and with themes much deeper than they initially appear.
Do Androids Dream of Electric Sheep is a muddled mess of a story that despite having some intriguing ideas in the end is just really, really, REALLY boring.
In fact, if you've ever seen any of the documentaries about the making of the movie or read any interviews with cast and crew, it gets almost funny after a while. Anyone who ever read the novella ended up saying something along the lines of, "I read the book, which I didn't like. But this script was great!"
Average folks dont understand what's so great about 2001: A Space Odyssey either.
But everyone seems to get Star Trek and Star Wars.
...
Yah. But Star Trek & Star Wars were both meant be accessible to mass audiences. Trek was the culmination of a long effort by Roddenberry to produce a showcase for his TV directing/producing talents, & a base to launch his company on another series & another series & another series. Wars was shot on a shoestring, & was Lucas' effort to bootstrap himself & his production company into the Hollywood stratosphere. Wars was a tremendous hit & succeeded outright. Trek sputtered & died, but the franchise kept chugging along & eventually spawned several more TV series, movies, specials & on & on.
Kubrick & Clarke didn't worry about how accessible 2001 was, & I don't think that R. Scott nor Dick in Blade did, either. Kubrick was used to getting his way, you can look @ his production over the years. Scott is much the same. I think the studios backed both men & their projects in the hope that lightening would strike again - & in a way, it did. Both movies are revered for their visuals. I think the acting was better in Blade - but there just wasn't much for the actors to do in 2001 - it wasn't that kind of movie.
*why is Los Angeles seemingly now part of Japan or Hong Kong? Why is the world so disgusting but still perfectly hospitable?
**The city is twice as dense as any modern city and there are parking meters and parking structures everywhere....
Blade Runner is so revered because it's basically an empty shell that seems smarter and deeper than it really is, allowing pompous people the opportunity to explain to other people what the movie is really about.
Here's the test: Go to that annoying guy you know who thinks he's smartest person in the world(everyone knows that guy) and ask him what he thinks about Blade Runner. Dollars to donuts he'll tell you how amazing it is, then share all of his stupid ideas about it.
All I can say is I saw it in a theater, went in expecting nothing as I knew nothing about it, and I sure didn't find it an empty shell.
Did I walk out amazed? Yes. I had never seen the future as complete as this in all regards. The detail of Los Angeles was completely amazing. There was an entire society at work there, not just setwork.
And the replicants made perfect sense to me. I knew that a WWII fighter pilot had a life expectancy of 6 weeks, so it made sense that replicants would be the future's cannon fodder. Since we hold our best human fighters in exceptionally high regard as a species, it made sense that the best robots would be most like humans.
Regardless, I'm sure half of the audience didn't get most of it, except as a basic good guy, bad guy scenario, and the movie worked just fine on that level. But just as many viewers understood what and where the substance was, and there was plenty of it.
The only reason I bought the ticket was because it starred Harrison Ford and was directed by Ridley Scott. I had seen Scott's first movie, The Duelists, and loved it. That movie was dark, but I wasn't prepared for the darkness of Blade Runner at all. I think very few who saw it were. It left me with a lot to think about, and there was no happy ending in the happy ending.
That was one big reason why it didn't do well, but it left an indelible mark on my memory like few movies have, and when I re-watched it 30 years later, that impact was still intact. I did find the director's cut more satisfying the second time around, though. As a picture of a disfunctional society, Scott's original vision was more potent than the ending the studio forced on him.
Blade Runner is an unequalled classic in story, direction, and design, both visual and aural. By far Ridley Scott's best movie, even if much of its genius was accidental..
Yes, the visuals and soundtrack of this movie are what made it special for me.
Now on Netflix, is that what prompted this thread?
Yah, the scenario inBlade (the movie) is that Earth is emptying out - everyone with ambition & that can pass the genetic testing/scanning, is moving off planet, to the frontier. That's one reason that the city infrastructure is visibly failing & decaying, buildings are empty or half-empty, etc. That's also the appeal of noir - everyone is on the make, hustling just to get by.
Decker & the other Blade Runners are holding the line, until some awful decision is taken about the ultimate fate of the stay-behind humans on Earth. (Think Casablanca, another movie where people are trying to flee the approaching disaster. A lot of the same notes are hit: divided loyalties, murky motives, crime, smoke-filled rooms, infiltration, betrayal, etc.)
I knew Dick's work by the time I saw the movie - but I was still impressed with the visual translations & representations of that bleak place. & of course, the movie had to flesh out a lot of background that was never explicit, as I recall, in the story (Do Androids dream of electric sheep?). See also What Hollywood owes to Metal Hurlant & similar documentary videos - on Star Wars, Matrix, Fifth Element, etc. Very interesting POV. French science fiction graphic novels & strips established a lot of shots & sequences that were directly cut & pasted into mainstream Science Fiction movies, as in the above. (& some of the leading French artists worked briefly in Hollywood, too, mostly on science fiction films, some graphic work here & there.)
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Quote:
Originally Posted by banjomike
That was one big reason why it didn't do well, but it left an indelible mark on my memory like few movies have, and when I re-watched it 30 years later, that impact was still intact. I did find the director's cut more satisfying the second time around, though. As a picture of a disfunctional society, Scott's original vision was more potent than the ending the studio forced on him.
Which ending did you see? I can't remember if the scene in a car with a VO was added later to the theatrical release.
On a tangent, this particular ending scene didn't make it into any of the cuts (it even contains flashbacks to other deleted scenes), but it's interesting because there's no VO in this one and it confirms that Deckard is a replicant.
This movie was incredible, except for one thing that irritates me to no end. People buy into that Decker was a replicant himself and fall for how that's supposed to be so clever and explain everything. Maybe they threw that in there to be cool but it just isn't substantiated at all in the film itself. Decker was not a replicant, that just makes no sense no matter what the director says. Or he did a thoroughly crappy job trying to explain it and it just looks like he claimed it with no basis in the film to justify it.
On a tangent, this particular ending scene didn't make it into any of the cuts (it even contains flashbacks to other deleted scenes), but it's interesting because there's no VO in this one and it confirms that Deckard is a replicant.
The so-called "Nexus 6 cut" was done by fans, not the filmmakers.
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Different audiences, different intents
