The Future... well, not quite

Rating: 10/10 (30 May 2012)

Futurist Syd Mead (design stylist who started with Ford and moved into film with his first feature, Star Trek – the Motion Picture) gave director Ridley Scott a blueprint by which he could formulate a world of the future, an apocalyptic or apocryphal vision of the future where humanity would struggle to survive in a dirty, dusty, polluted world dominated by oil and where most species of animals had gone extinct.
The object being, we'll just clone them and everything will be OK. It was easy to believe such a world would come to pass in the late 1970's when the Arab oil embargo woke America up to the fact that oil and money, not the military, would call the shots for the people of planet Earth.
The story of "Blade Runner" is only loosely based on Phillip K. Dick's novel, "Do Androids Dream of Electric Sheep" whereby Dick envisioned a time where cyborgs (combinations of humans and robots) would merge into androids and become as intelligent as people – begging the question, "Would they dream?" Scott gave the weight of the film to special effects supervisors Richard Yuricich, who had already proved his worth on "Star Wars" and Douglas Trumbull, who had set the groundwork for special effects with his early work on "2001" and then later on "Close Encounters." Trumbull loved to use miniatures while Yuricich's approach was to use opticals and traveling mattes. Combined, the two men created some dazzling special effects that hold up even after forty years and the advent of CGI. Of course, it helps to have perpetual darkness and constant rain to mask any deficiencies. Still, we can suspend our disbelief and take in this once possible vision of a world now just seven years away. We can believe in the flying cars and pyramid shaped buildings that rise out of old LA because they help to tell this dark story and its tale of a future world run by corporations run amok.
The problem with predicting the future is that most people, most authors, never look at the practical side of the equation. While it would be nice to have a flying car, the idea that the sky is filled with flying objects that could crash into one another over a school yard or a hospital or a city park is even more frightening than a robot that walks, talks, and looks human. Meanwhile there is the practical side of creating replicants, the so-called "cheap labor" used to help create offworld colonies. The cost of even one such creature would be astronomical compared to the cost benefits derived. The idea a corporation could crank them out like car parts in a world already filled with seven billion people is downright silly. Why build a robot when plenty of cheap labor is readily available for one one-hundred-thousandth of the cost? Predicting the future is tricky business.
In the end, it is the "film noir" side of "Blade Runner" that is exciting to watch along with its versatile cast of players. Scott employs his actors to perform as Humphrey Bogart might in the "Maltese Falcon" – say little, express more with the eyes and appearance. Scott's use of score is questionable. Vangelis purely synthetic sound at times grates on the nerve when it overwhelms a scene and takes getting used to. However, what has made the sci-fi offering a classic perhaps falls upon the steadiness of actor Harrison Ford, who emotes even less than the entire cast combined. His universal appeal comes from his common sense of humanity which he brings to every role – that sort of wise handyman who can fix whatever is wrong. Scott was wise to cast Ford, who manages to keep one foot of this whacko fantasy on the ground long enough for us to relate.
While I gave the film an overall rating of 10 because I believe you should see it, the film has fallen from grace in my mind and is no longer the "Wow" movie I saw in LA at its premiere years ago.