Future imperfect

Rating: 6/10 (3 December 2014)

I can easily see why this film has become the cult movie it is today, regularly championed as one of the best sci-fi movies ever made. Considering it was made almost thirty years ago, it's still visually stunning with its neo-noir gloomy cinematography, the exterior shots made darker still with seemingly constant heavy rain mixed with an imaginative future vision taking in flying cars and outsize, almost floating video-advertisements, the latter at once familiar in its common-placedness and yet disturbing in its exaggeration and omnipresence.
There really isn't that much of a story with Ford basically re-hired by the police force he previously left to track down four humanistic androids (called replicants) escaped to earth from a space colony and now determined to revenge themselves on their creator. Besides some interaction between Ford and the replicant creator's is-she-or-isn't-she P.A., the film moves inevitably towards a final confrontation between Ford's Deckard's character and the replicant leader, the sadistic, revengeful Rutger Houer.
For me though, the film loves its own look a little too much and is ponderous to watch at times, interspersed by scenes of random but brutal violence. We fleetingly come across minor human characters who seem to have regressed from society none more so than JF Sebastian who becomes their link to ultimate target megalomaniac Tyrell, who lives in cluttered squalor alone with his homemade mechanical toys and robots.
In fact I'll take cluttered squalor as pretty much my description of the whole movie. Inevitably it devolves to a showdown between a rampaging, but fast expiring Hauer and an exhausted, beaten-up Ford which doesn't play out as you'd expect and an enigmatic final scene which interestingly questions whether Deckard's mightn't be a replicant himself.
"Blade Runner" certainly succeeds in serving up a bleak vision of the future reminiscent of Fritz Lang's epochal "Metropolis" decades earlier. At times nightmarish in its sheer banality, it can be seen to have inspired future generations of directors and writers in film and print. Personally, it still seems to me like a short story elongated to movie length but there's no denying its imagination and artistic vision, even if I might have preferred a bit more pace and action along the way to lighten the darkness a little.