The Best of the Almost Great Movies

Rating: 6/10 (15 January 2008)

There are so many comments regarding this movie that I doubt anything I write will be seen as relevant. Obviously it's affected a lot of people, because of all the comments here. I saw this movie when it first came out, then I saw it again when they thankfully removed Harrison Ford's voiceovers from it (which he himself didn't think was appropriate for the film.) This film has apparently been re-edited several times, but no matter how many times they do, it will never be completely satisfying. What it needed was one more rewrite at the beginning, with development of one tiny element: the characters.
We don't care about the replicants enough; because we don't know enough about them. We don't care about Harrison Ford's character enough, because he kills too soullessly, "just doing his job", and doesn't give it a second thought. Which brings me to the movie's biggest deficit: He has no character arc. He doesn't grow or change throughout the movie. Phillip K. Dick mentioned in a rare interview I'm glad I got to read, that he intended the replicants and the character of Deckard to undergo a reversal: the replicants become more human, with a conscience, by the end of the film, and Deckard becomes less and less human because of his actions, until their characters have completely switched. This would have given a satisfying and complete meaning to the film. All the replicants wanted to do was live, not be slaves and to be left alone for the remainder of their brief lives. All Deckard wanted to do was kill them, get paid and go home. No thought given to his actions afterwards.
We learn nothing of the replicants' inner feelings except the main one, and then only peripherally. If they had been allowed to emote and to feel pain, we would have empathized with them and had a problem with Deckard killing them. So there really is no-one to empathize with, certainly not Ford, who plays a futuristic Charles Bronson character out of Deathwish, who killed muggers and punks with no emotion whatsoever.
Possible Spoiler:
One major quibble I have is with the murder of Sebastian, the one (and only) empathetic character out of the whole film. He acts as the unwilling host for two of the replicants, he comes to like them and they seem to like him, but after the head replicant kills Tyrell, the genius who bioengineered the replicants, he goes after Sebastian, and we hear later that the replicant killed him too. Why? This completely undermines the evolution of the replicant towards humanity. We can see why the replicant would kill his creator who created him to be a disposable slave who will die after four years, but a man who had helped him? It was a senseless contradiction and brought us back to square one about caring about the replicants. (Even with Darth Vader, the audience empathized with him a little, being scarred up and a victim of his destiny. He didn't just kill people randomly.)
So, there we have it. The reason why, in my opinion, the movie will never be as great as it could be, because nothing changes, and we have no-one (and nothing) to really care about. At the end we're left with a film that creates a sense of mood, and not a moral or meaningful statement. That's too bad; it could have done all of that, with one more rewrite and ten minutes more of developing (i.e., evolving) the characters. Rutger Hauer's "tears in the rain" speech at the end unfortunately is not enough to accomplish that by itself.
However, I doubt that Ridley Scott cares about any of that, as he endlessly re-edits the visuals in his film......