In the summer of 1982, Blade Runner, a science fiction film directed by Ridley Scott, and based on the Phillip K. Dick novel "Do Androids Dream Of Electric Sheep?", opened in movie theaters. Scott had just come off of directing 1979’s hit Alien, and BR lead actor Harrison Ford had just appeared in the previous year’s smash hit, Raiders Of The Lost Ark. With such an excellent pedigree behind it, one would think Blade Runner would have been an instant hit. Yet faced with the onslaught of the box-office hit E.T. (which, like Raiders, was also directed by Steven Spielberg) the darker-toned, more intelligent Blade Runner became a bomb. But while it faded into box office obscurity, Blade Runner would wind up casting a very large shadow over the field of science fiction--both literature and filmed--for the next 25 years.
On the surface, Blade Runner’s storyline was simple. Taking place in a grimy, over-built and overpopulated Los Angeles of the year 2019, Blade Runner is the term for a special police officer whose job it is to hunt down replicants--artificial humans created in a lab--who have managed to illegally make it to earth, and "retire" them. In short, the Blade Runner kills his prey--but since they are seen as being nothing more than a product, a machine that has run amok, killing replicants is seen as being no big deal…at least to natural-born humans. Rick Deckard (Harrison Ford) is called out of retirement when six replicants have been discovered to have made it planet-side. Two of them have been killed while attempting illegal access into the Tyrell Corporation, the main manufacturer of replicants, leaving four.
They are Roy Batty (Rutger Hauer), Pris (Darryl Hannah), Leon (Brion James) and Zhora (Joanna Cassidy), and they’re on the run for more than their freedom, they’re seeking the Big Answers from the one man on earth who truly is their god: Eldon Tyrell (Joe Turkel), the CEO of the Tyrell Corporation. Blade Runner was that rare science fiction film that dealt with truly big ideas in an intelligent way. It’s most basic premise was this: what did it mean to be human? Deckard gets hit in the face with this philosophical conundrum when he interviews Rachael (Sean Young), Tyrell’s young assistant who turns out to be a replicant herself, albeit a far more advanced model. "More human than human," Tyrell boasts to Deckard, proudly citing the credo of his corporation. But at what cost? The fact that Rachael was a replicant was kept a secret even to herself, and the revelation that she’s not truly human is shattering news for her.
But perhaps more than the intelligently handled philosophical questions, Blade
Runner has become famous for its now legendary production design, which imagined
a bleak, dystopian future--a stark landscape where a corporate tycoon like
Tyrell lords it over the down-trodden world from a massive, Egyptian-temple-like
building. Scott had imaginatively blended the 1940s style of film noir with 21st
century urban decay. The era of Blade Runner is that of a pre-apocalypse, with
civilization just teetering on the brink of oblivion, and what makes the film so
scary and profound is how closely it mirrors our own society. It’s not that
Blade Runner has become relevant in the last 25 years, it’s that our world has
finally caught up to the film--both in the sense that more people now "get it,"
as well as the fact that the film’s nightmarish vision has become prescient in
how it now reflects our present day fears. In other words, Blade Runner has aged
remarkably well.
This four disc edition offers several versions of the film, one of which is The Final Cut, where Ridley Scott slightly reworked the film to remove some of the mistakes in the original theatrical print--such as the climatic scene of the dove flying into a clear blue sky; as well as mismatched lip synching to lines in several scenes. The narration, as well as the more cheerful ending, are still gone. But if you enjoyed the original theatrical version, which included those elements, that’s also available in this set, as is the 1992 director’s cut, with the added unicorn scene (which is also in the Final Cut, as well). There’s a slew of special features, including several commentaries by Scott and others on the Final Cut, as well as a fourth disc of extra goodies.
And there’s also Dangerous Days: Making Blade Runner, a three hour plus
retrospective documentary that is, quiet simply, the definitive "making of"
feature, with plenty of interviews from both the cast and crew. It’s a
staggeringly detailed look into all aspects of the production, with many
wonderfully blunt assessments by all those involved. This documentary showed
that making Blade Runner wasn’t easy--yet it was well worth the struggle, for
the result is one of the best science fiction films to come out of the 20th
century.
--SF
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