Death and Transfiguration

Rating: 5/10 (26 October 2009)

In "2001: A Space Odyssey," Stanley Kubrick turned men into machines and machines into men to question where we had come from and, with artificial intelligence, where we were going. It worked spectacularly and has stuck in our collective consciousness since 1964. (Most Americans probably hear the opening bars of Also Sprach Zarathustra and think black monoliths the way Pavolv's dog heard a bell and thought dinner.) Ridley Scott, in his own meditation on death and transfiguration assembled 18 years afterwards, toys with similar themes. His future, set precisely in 2019, is a noir world of spent parts, sidewalk dining, handguns, advertising hype, unfeeling cops who don't need no stinking machines to detect an absence of feelings, dolls in theatrical make-up and shoulder pads, and androids who live in places like the Bradbury Hotel -- in other words, a future rather less believable than Kubrick's because it is so intentionally retro. It is also a world in which aryan creations meet their creators, crucify themselves without need of crosses, and -- if they don't exactly die for our sins -- have at least witnessed them before they pass on. Speaking of witnessing, I somehow missed seeing this movie for the first 27 years after it was released. Today I watched the theatrical version of "Blade Runner," the one with the hokey happy ending, on my computer. It was stylish, late-industrial, soft-porn nonsense but still well worth the price of admission -- which, in my case, was nothing. The plot, with its protagonists ascending into the equivalent of Sam Goldwyn's heaven at the end of "Wuthering Heights," is as coherent as that of most action movies, the sets hearken back to "Metropolis," Harrison Ford overacts less than he is wont, and the women, or maybe they are androids, are stunning, even -- or maybe especially -- when they are doing back flips into the camera. But it's still stylish nonsense, unredeemed by a legitimate idea or human relation. Five out of ten.