Blade Runner Keeps Running

The Digital Bits has a detailed write-up of the new version of Blade Runner, the – allegedly – “Final Cut,” which will be released on DVD in December (and which can be ordered through Amazon here).

Blade Runner (along with Close Encounters) has always been the textbook film demonstrating both the benefits and the pitfalls of preparing revised versions of classic films. The benefits are clear because the Director’s Cut is so clearly a better version. Yet it also illustrated the problems these director’s versions can produce: there are usually compromises involved in making the director’s cut, which may create new problems or shortcomings, and the original cut (which remains historically important and for some might be the preferred version) can fall out of circulation. So for years it was hard to get the original version of Blade Runner; other films, like Close Encounters, Apocalypse Now, Star Wars and Touch of Evil are locked in similar limbo.

With the The Blade Runner situation, however, we finally seem to be getting the best of all possible worlds. The new cut looks to have fixed the shortcomings of the previous Director’s Cut (which are touched upon in the Digital Bits article and discussed in some detail in Paul Sammon’s book Future Noir). And the new sets will make available both the original cut, previously unreleased on DVD, and the Director’s Cut, so there’s no question of historical revisionism. There are even cheap two-disk versions for those who only want the new cut and don’t want to get price-gouged. So Warner Brothers deserve nothing but praise for their handling this new version.

It’s all good news, then, for the film’s many fans. Yet while I like the film, I’m not one of its most ardent admirers. It’s chief merit, in my mind, is visual: there’s no doubt that its production design was massively influential. It’s pretty much impossible for any big-future-city in a movie to break away from the basic look established by Blade Runner, so that in films like The Fifth Element, Attack of the Clones and AI we get cities that pretty much look like they could be neighbourhoods of Ridley Scott’s Los Angeles. It wrested the title of the definitive future-urban film from Fritz Lang’s Metropolis and has held on to it for 25 years; in this respect, Blade Runner more than earns its reputation.

Yet in other respects, it seems to me the film’s virtues have been exaggerated. At a story and character level, it’s never been that satisfying for me (although there are obviously many who have connected with it on a deep level). It gets a pass as entertainment, I think, because the mood of the film is so enticing due to the combination of its great visual look and Vangelis’ atmospheric score. But the characters are unenaging and the story is simple and episodic.

Of course, the characters are to some extent deliberately unengaging: it echoes other notable science fiction films such as 2001 in this respect. Harrison Ford’s Deckard is intended to be a shell of a man, who rediscovers some semblance of humanity through the process of hunting replicants; we are also invited to speculate (at least in the two post-release cuts) as to whether he is human at all, and whether that matters. Yet the film’s treatment of these subjects is trite, at best.

The idea of implanting memories to shape an identity is the film’s meatiest science fiction concept, and it’s a classic Phillip K Dick notion (Dick wrote the novel on which the film was based). Yet the film deals with this fairly superficially: that the suggestion that Deckard was himself a replicant could be erased so completely from the original cut is indicative of how little the film explores this idea. Other Dick adaptations since (Total Recall, Minority Report, A Scanner Darkly) have gotten a lot more out of Dick’s ideas than Scott did in Blade Runner. While Blade Runner deserves both artistic and historic recognition as the predecessor of those films, it shouldn’t blind us to the fact that the later films (as well as other Dick-influenced works such as The Matrix) are considerably more interesting.

There has been a fair effort from academic circles to re-invest the film with difficulty and interest: it has been the subject of endless academic writing, including two anthologies of essays (and I should admit that I’ve added to this clutter of writing with my own essay in Will Brooker’s anthology The Blade Runner Experience). These analyses often pick up on the film’s postmodern tendencies: its mangling of different historical influences; its pre-occupation with accelarated lifespans; the mediation of life through media and technology; and so on. To a point these critiques are spot-on: there’s no doubt Blade Runner is an important early postmodernist work. Yet even here I wonder if all the subsequent writing has added much to the two classic postmodernist essays about the film written by Giulian Bruno (in the Summer 1987 isse of October) and David Harvey (in his 1990 book The Condition of Postmodernity). Once you add in Scott Bukatman’s thorough look at the film for the BFI Modern Classics series, written in 1997, I’m not sure there’s too much else to say. Apart from its postmodernism and its design, nothing about it has proven very prescient. A film like Tron, also from 1982, was probably more ahead of its time in its rudimentary portrayal of cyberspace: but because so much of the production design and scripting of that film is embarrassing, there isn’t a rush of people wanting to write about it. Its nerdy computer geekery doesn’t stand a chance of recognition nect to Blade Runner‘s brooding cool.

This is all probably sounding more dismissive than I want it to be: Blade Runner obviously opened the door for big-budget science fiction to look at some more interesting themes than Star Wars or Scott’s own Alien had: the films I’ve cited as more interesting than Blade Runner wouldn’t have been the same without its example, and it has proven a lot more influential than the previous Hollywood attempt at thinking-person’s science fiction, Kubrick’s 2001. But when the discussion segues into talk of how mind-blowingly deep and profound it is, I’m afraid you lose me.