Blade Runner

Post Reply New Topic

I simply adore Blade Runner, have done since I first saw it in the 80s, it works on so many levels for me especially what it has to say about human differences and the way “different” people are treated. From the artificial humans (Roy Batty and the replicants) to the people who don't quite make the “grade” (like JF Sebastian) left behind on a dying Earth, while all the rich healthy and privileged go off to make a new paradise for themselves on the off world colonies, the movie speaks very strongly to me as an aspie.

I love the subtle underplayed acting

I love the amazing pre CGI hand crafted model making and FX

I love the Brilliant Vangelis score

In fact everything about the movie

I do prefer the directors cut versions over the origional narrated one though.

Anyone else here share my passion for BR?

Hey sure, I loved the book and the movie was good work too.
Did you read the book? It gives much more detailsabout the characters & motivations behind them.

But it's by far not the best book of Philip K. Dick.
"Ubik" is another great one and "Clans of the Alphane Moon". "The three stigmata of Palmer Eldritch" not too forget...
All his characters are crazy people in strange situations.

Hi PilotPirx,
I did read the book a long time after I saw the movie and for me it was one of those rare occasions where I felt the film was better than the novel it was based on.
I think Hampton Fancher and David Peoples did a fantastic job with the script and got right down to the heart / essence of the story discarding the unnecessary parts of the book that wouldn't have worked well in a movie context.

I also get a magical feel and atmosphere from the movie that I didn't get from the book, I was trained as an artist so I'm probably biased, transfixed and bedazzled by those amazing Ridley Scott visuals.

Great sci-fi are those that aren't necessarily about sci-fi. Blade Runner is one of those.

I think you're right, the movie has a great quality. But still there are some details it's missing. For example this thing with the electrical sheep, which to be able to buy is one of the main motivations of the main character.
Or that small part where the company building the androids tries to bribe him with a bird. The bird appears shortly in the movie if I remember right, but it was never explained why. Or the scene where JF Sebastian accidentially kills a cat, thinking it's an artificial one...

So the movie gets around one of the things I disliked about Philip K. Dick: While I adore his ideas and the setup of his stories, the environments and characters, he isn't exactly the best stylist. His Dialogues are artificial and the plot is often developing too slow. Nothing you could compare with really great SciFi writers like Bruce Sterling or William Gibson.

The movie takes the core idea and then works with really great pictures. In fact, I read the book first. And when I read books, I see the story in my mind like a movie. In most cases I prefer my own pictures and often be slightly disappointed when I see the movie somebody made. With this one it was the other way around, the movie was far better than everything I could imagine myself.

One of the many reasons that I enjoy Blade Runner (aside from the amazing cityscape, the consistent dark tone of the acting & the credible plot … ) is that so many of the characters seem to be aspie.

Deckard & Rachael seem particularly ill-at-ease in the world of emotion (for good reason, we see, as the plot develops).

Sebastian is in a world of his special interests and creations, yet feels alone. He is brilliant in narrow areas (e.g., chess, robotics) yet unable to read the intentions of those around him; he is manipulated and destroyed.

The escaped replicants are a little too over-the-top to be mere aspies; cold, calculating, they seem to be better described as anti-social, narcissistic personalities. Of course, as their 'personalities' were man-made (programmed in a factory) serious flaws are to be expected.

The scene in which Batty, the most brilliant (the light that burns twice as bright) of the sought replicants, spares Deckard’s life creates some confusion; if the replicant can be more human than the film’s humans – was the manufactured personality/moral character flawed? Or superior?

I see what you mean although I really liked it when the motivation changed from the sheep to loving Rachel (you gotta have a love interest in a movie ) I thought it bought a more complex dimension to the whole thing Deckard (who may or may not be a replicant himself) falls in love with a genetically engineered machine, it raises the great question "at what point does a artificial intelligence qualify to be human?" If a machine feels the same as we do and develops our emotions, love, hate, fear, empathy is it not then human in everything but name?

The fact that the movie moved away from the acquisition of animals over to the human V's humanoid replicant story was one of the things I preferred over the book, the visuals are just stunning though aren't they every frame is a work of art.

I totally agree with you on the aspie parallel, I took the “more human than human” slogan to be like a commercial sales tagline, meaning replicants are stronger faster and more intelligent than human beings.
The problem with the Nexus 6 replicants is that they were so like us that they started to develop emotions of their own simply because they are physiologically identical to humans, the emotions came as a result of them being just as complex as us however because they were manufactured with a 4 year lifespan built in a flaw in their character emerged - self preservation.
The Tyrell Corporation seeing this flaw in their replicant slaves programmed them with human memories to create a buffer for their newly emerging emotions.
This proved to be ineffective because the replicants continued to develop their own feelings like love for other replicants and at the end of the film just before he died Roy Batty finally exhibited the human qualities of nobility and empathy by saving Deckard’s life even though Deckard had just killed his love Priss.

The scene at the end showed that Roy was no longer just a machine but had developed the qualities that make us all human.

Well that's my interpretation anyway

Arrrgh The Call Of Hollywood. It MUST have a love story (and a happy end of course)... Actually he fell in love with her in the book too.
Falling in love with a machine isn't that complicated anyway, since humans can fall in love with a playboy picture or the singer of a band or whatever artificial thing that triggers that little switch in the brain. (But a machine falling in love is interesting, so if Deckert was an android himself, that would raise many questions)

But anyway, the religious approach of humans to animals as in the book was slightly incredible (Typical Dick thing, he often is too esoteric and forces some high level moral on his actors.)

Yes I’ve read that Hollywood producers in general think that female audiences won't be interested in a movie unless there’s love story to keep them interested, the action is there mainly for us men Women are more than capable of enjoying other aspects of a story but Hollywood is all about formula and they are usually too scared to break with convention.
It wasn't just the fact that Deckard fell in love with a machine that interested me it was also the question raised (if we eventually made a half machine half genetically engineered copy of a human being, at what point do we accept that the man made copy is now so like us that it is in fact another type of human being and as such deserves the same rights as a human being) that is was the films core message for me.
Another point that interested me was the 3 tier class structure with society fractured into a duel underclass where both the replicants along with the poor humans and (so called) defective pople like JF Sebastian are both used as slaves by the controlling and powerful off world humans, (this is where the comparisons with Fritz Lang’s Sci Fi classic 1927 movie Metropolis come into play)
Both the Replicants and the humans left on earth want the same thing to be treated equally and IMO was another of Roy Batty’s motivations for saving Deckard’s life, his little speech at the end of the movie seems to confirm it “quite an experience to live in fear isn’t it? That’s what it is to be a slave” Deckard is just another slave used to do the dirty work too unpleasant or dangerous for ruling classes.

Roy Batty understands this and proved he was indeed a fully fledged human being by showing nobility and empathy for Deckard by saving his life just as his was ending.

Ridley Scott said in a documentary that Deckard was a Replicant who didn’t know he wasn’t human just like Rachel before him, that would explain the Unicorn dream sequence and why at the very end of the directors cut Gaff leaves Deckard a message the origami Unicorn, Deckard would then understand he is himself not human.

Others including some of the actors in the movie disagree with Ridley so I guess it’s still open to interpretation.

Ironically for all that the film has to recommend it, Blade Runner did not do all that well at the Box Office. Sadly, it seems that the public would rather shell out their cash to see a movie with a driving soundtrack & top notch special effects. I like to watch a movie that tells a story or has a message. I hate it when I spend $20 in the theater & walk out wondering what the hell I just saw.

I have seen the final cut version of this timeless classic. It...reached me on more levels then I can describe

Read the book, or watch the movie "A Scanner Darkly". It is probably the story that is the closest to being autobiographical about Phillip K. Dick.

The funny thing is, I never really appreciated the movie as much until I read the book. The book explores "empathy" in a way much deeper than the movie, and really pushes on its importance to being human. I read it in college and I don't think I even knew what empathy was at that point (I thought it was just a fancy word for sympathy) and it really struck me that I don't have it, and never had. After that, the movie really hit me a lot closer.

I'm a huge Bladerunner fan and a Phillip K Dick fan also

There is one PKD book I like, The Man in the High Castle, one of the better alternate history scifi, I would like to see made into a movie or mini series.