Style over substance - 1:0

Rating: Null/10 (17 July 2000)

When you watch movies like 'Blade Runner' or 'Alien' you realize how much Ridley Scott was a typical director of the 80's and you wonder how he now became a typical director of the 90's. With these two films I mentioned he directed the two most important science-fiction movies since 'Star Wars' and defined a style which became regular in films like 'Dark City', the other 'Alien'-films, 'Outland' or 'Terminator'. This dark, quiet tone with not too much action, not too much story but a lot of style and atmosphere. Today it seems impossible to make a film like 'Blade Runner'.
Maybe one of the most important differences is the look of the special effects. I like big CG-effects which make you go 'Ah' and 'Oh', but the effects in sci-fi films of the 80's are different and somehow better than today. Most of them are models and matte paintings and this looks somehow more realistic. You see that the big complex the industrial named Tyrell lives in is real. It is standing there. This always amazed me.
But 'Blade Runner' has more than special effects, although they were and are really impressing. I was pretty sure there was more and during watching the film the second time after several years (this time in the Director's Cut) I wondered what. I mean, the story isn't really so complicated and hard to understand. Cop has to find four replicants. Replicants don't want to die. I mean, that's it. The characters all seem to be unhappy and with a lot of secrets but that's nothing new. This hasn't changed pretty much. And you don't get to know so much more about them.
I think the films lives nearly entirely out of his atmosphere. Everything looks so dark and so much full of atmosphere you nearly can feel it. It's always raining (and it does in most dark science-fiction-films, because there are less things that produce more atmosphere) and always dark (the same). The characters are looking more at each other than they talk. They look at each other and into mirrors and in to the dark sky. This is what makes them alive, since you don't know anything about them.
Consider Harrison Ford's character. At the beginning he sits in a Chinese fast-food bar. He says he quit his job as a blade runner and he doesn't want to do it anymore. Why? Why can his former chief (M. Emmet Walsh) so simply put him back into his old job? You see some photos in Ford's apartment but never get to know who the people on it are. But still I think it's his best role ever. It's his only role where he plays a character who isn't simply good. He does a bad job and he knows it.
Still, this a really fascinating movie with lots of neat details like the big elevator at Tyrell's or the puppets at Sebastian's who always run into the same door. And the showdown between Ford and Hauer (who had definitely his best role here) is just fantastic. But does anything of this make real sense? I'm not quite sure. And I'm less sure if I think about the work of the author Philip K. Dick on whose novel the film is based. Dick is a fantastic sci-fi writer and he has always a lot to say. He makes us think. 'Blade Runner' made me think too. But I just didn't get anywhere. Maybe I'm just stupid.