Harrison Ford as Decker, Blade Runner (1982)
Imagine Berlin Fashion Week, all the outfits, posers and flamboyance, but as an entire city. Picture people trawling the streets with lightsaber umbrellas. Neon is the new black. Androids wear do-rags. It’s LA in the year 2019 and also the backdrop to Blade Runner. Based on Philip K. Dick’s novel ‘Do Androids Dream of Electric Sheep’, Ridley Scott’s epic tells a cautionary galactic tale of genetic engineering and robot self discovery. It follows Decker played by Harrison Ford, an elite robot-killing bounty hunter; known as a Blade Runner, chasing six rogue Nexus-6 androids.
Running alongside the hunt plot is Blade Runner’s romance with Rachel played by Sean Young, a droid, who is unaware of her manufactured origins. The line between human and robot is constantly blurred. Blade Runner carves out a romance with Rachel whilst simultaneously acting on orders to kill her android counterparts, and feels almost nothing for them. No trial or questioning, just shot on sight. Blade Runner is the justice system and Corporations are the law. Kept in secret by the owner of the Tyrell Corporation Rachel tracks down Decker and they knock boots. #Uranus.
Cue sunset beach style sax music. The score absolutely killed parts of this film for me, and although it has all the stylings of a futuristic noir detective thriller, it also felt like a prime example of a film signalling what I should feel at each scene. Another demonstration being towards the end when alpha android Roy Batty played by Rutger Hauer, just before dying releases a lone white dove from his hands. Seriously bruv?
Understandably the action is generally sparse to explore relationships between human and robot, corporations and the populace and science and ethics. The storyline has nothing on say Looper, but where the longevity lies in Blade Runner is its cultural impact from its release up to now. It did forecast ethically questionable advancements such as cloning and the implanting of false memories that exist at present. Nexus-6 robots, like Frankenstein’s Monster in Mary Shelley’s classic represent the possible moral consequences of creating life and the repercussions of dealing with artificial intelligence.
Memories and photographs are two elements that recur in this film. The real and perceived, tangible and the illusion, and yet what this film tells us is that to behave and look as human, is not enough. The Nexus-6 robots repeatedly use and cling to photographs to claim their own validity and as proof of being genuine, of owning memories.
In a city where everything is over-saturated with neon and yet seems to be in constant darkness, the citizens are oblivious to anything around them. As Decker chases a semi clothed android through a shopping mall and shoots her down, sending her through a window there is hardly a murmur from passersby. To bleed, to love, to fear and to remember aren’t enough. In the end having human status boils down to one thing, are you a benefit? Or a hazard.
Bare Reviews Innit. Wot. 