Mood is there, everything else is not

Rating: 5/10 (18 July 2019)

As it often happens when you watch ancient classics in a modern age, the strongest feeling evoked by Blade Runner is, unfortunately, boredom. I sat to watch it for the second time with intentional bias to see only positives but in the end the only positives I found was tone and technical details. Blade Runner, godfather of all that is cyberpunk, truly has that stagnant atmosphere of futuristic desolation essential to the genre. Sunless cityscape with a thousand points of meaningless lights, streets littered with nowhere people, isolation creeping behind the cynical antihero... memorable. Visual representation is great and groundbreaking for a 1982 year (I guess). It conveys the feeling and it is enough for me.
But everything else, namely script and, as a consequence, actors play, is a drab. Blade Runner plot is weak and its direction is even weaker. The pursuit for escaped replicants does not to grab attention at any point of the movie. All the numerous scenes that try to emphasize the characters of the dystopia, bring mostly disillusionment because they are either pretentious, banal or out of place. The pinnacle example is the renown final scene where Roy chases Deckard for whole ten minutes all the while howling like foolish dog. Can you truly say that scene had to be there in a full length? That it had to be there at all? Aside from countless artificial attempts to display the depth of the personas or philosophy of the setting Blade Runner has almost nothing. No action, no twists, no side stories, only quite predictable love thread between Deckard and Rachael. Ford's play is the remarkable but even he cannot do much with the script that ask you to "mope about" for 117 minutes straight.