a haunting sci-fi experience that you will grow to love...

Rating: Null/10 (16 February 2003)

For all those bemused by its popularity:
As most will tell you, Blade Runner really is a film that will grow on you. I first saw it when I was 13 and it went completely over my head. A few years later I watched it again and it went completely over my head. Then a while after that, again, it went completely over my head.

Ten years later I wish every sci-fi film could be like it.

Blade Runner is so brilliant because it is so "boring". It's not a sci-fi film out to excite with shootouts or chases or a big world-changing finale... even though it does include them. It has many concepts and ideas and characters that Ridley Scott refuses to explain and instead lets his audience decipher events and visuals with his or her own imagination... what a beautiful sentiment.
It's best not to approach Blade Runner as an action-packed one-note film that starts and ends with the opening titles and closing credits, a mistake most of us have made. The trick the film-makers pull is to merely suggest the scenes that you come to expect. You're given hints about mutinies aboad slave ships and crash landings in the ocean and replicants being fried walking through electrical fields, about off-world colonies and social-political machinations too complex to ream out in tiring exposition. You'll find that 50% of Blade Runner exists in your own head, that's the gift that the makers of this film have done... they've created a universe for every viewers mind to swim in.
The level of design is, in itself, a glowing testament to attention to detail. This is part of the joy of watching a Ridley Scott film. He doesn't just handsomely decorate his sets with odds-and-sods to make it look nice, his sets practically ooze character and history. Just look at J.F.Sabastian's apartment and all his self-made toys and assorted nick-knacks. Just look at the sushi-bar and its steaming heat trays and busy chefs. Just look at Chew's eye-shop and its frosted surfaces and vile, fleshy creations. You could spend an entire viewing just staring at all the different props and gadgets that lie about simply because, as previously mentioned, they could truly be for anything.
Jordan Cronenweth, the sadly departed cinematographer, did his best work on Blade Runner. He has given us visual melodies in which our eyes can dance to. His favourite shot was the one where a puff of Rachel's cigarette smoke is illuminated by light whilst Deckard is interviewing her and the image dissolves to a long shot... as if the previous one was just blown away. His crowd scenes are lit by gaudy neon signs and umbrella's with florescent handles and sparkling drops of rain. One of his greatest achievements was his lighting of J.F.Sabastians apartment building, filled with constantly moving shafts of light that fill the empty, lonely spaces.

Music wise, for a film all about the inevitability of death and the eternal question of "why are we here, what's it all about?", Vangelis' score really helps you to experience and feel the dark, the rain, the cold and the loneliness of Los Angeles circa 2019 and it's sorrowful hymns will make even the most synthetic of hearts pump warm, red blood. The best of which are Rachel's song and Memories Of Green (re-used in Scott's other film Someone To Watch Over Me). It's a famous and often talked about cornerstone of synthesized harmony.
But don't forget about characters. All the above images and sounds help to deepen what all the main character's feel in the film: a chronic fear of death. Whether it's Deckard constantly watching over his shoulder for danger "quite an experience to live in fear, isn't it?"; Rachel coming to terms with her hunted inhuman qualities "I'm not in the business, I am the business"; the other Replicants searching for a cure for mortality "the light that burns twice as bright burns half as long"; J.F.Sabastian's accelerated ageing; Bryant's illnesses (he pours Deckard two drinks simultaneously because he's too sick to drink himself, a brief nod to The Big Sleep) and Chew's slow freezing after having his protective coat ripped off. It's a story of the loneliness one feels when faced with the inevitable and his or her desperate search for a cure, something we can all relate to and will have to deal with sooner or later.
It also ends without a hero. Deckard neither succeeds nor fails, he just does what Roy Batty wants him to do: understand and empathise with why he's fighting for his life and why he had to escape a life of slavery. In the end Deckard silently realises where the human race has gone wrong in inventing replicants with feelings, and why he's glad not to be one of them... whether human or replicant is up to you :)
It also stands as being the most quotable sci-fi film since the Star Wars Trilogy.
Keep on watching it, you'll understand in time and as mentioned by others, the book Future Noir is a great way to kick-start your interest in the film as it goes through the film scene by scene like the commentary the DVD never had.