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Director: Ridley Scott

By Roderick Heath

An eye, filmed in colossal close-up, surveys a vista of bleak and awesome grandeur, the smeared lights and spurting fire of a future age reflected upon the iris. The act of watching for Ridley Scott, as for so many filmmakers, is equated with the Torah of cinema—behold! Kubrick’s vistas of Olympian space reflected in Dave Bowman’s eye give way to a different kind of star child, looking out upon the human world, or how humans have rebuilt their world. Look upon his works, ye mortals, Ozymandias has gone hi-tech—futuristic Los Angeles, in some nightmarish alternate 2019, with pyramidal skyscrapers, refineries spitting filth and flame into a sky biblically black with pollution, and cars that fly and zip like the chariots of the new world high above streets churning with human flotsam.

The audience views all this just like the strange, dangerous, desperate creations that come to Earth in search of the makers view it, as something new and yet remembered, a reflection of their own time turned into a scene at once debased and romantically overwhelming. After decades of digression through mutant beasts and rockets, science fiction cinema suddenly reconnected with its oldest, strongest living nerve, the dark and exultant worship of modernity that Moloch first glimpsed in Metropolis (1927). The soaring adamantine structures, the gleaming chrome-and-glass obelisks, the monuments to hubris, the dense and tangled blend of Expressionism and Art Deco in Fritz Lang’s sepia dreaming now festooned by neon and colossal billboards, delivered through Douglas Trumbull’s imagination-invading special effects. Scott’s electronic graffiti bit the hand that fed him: the director made ads and knows very well revenue makes the world go ’round. Product placement is a new religion.

The gods and kings are the genetic architects and their progeny; everyone else is now just there to make up the numbers. Nature has been exiled, killed off in fact. Animals have become so rare they’re only the impossible objects of a tycoon’s fancy. TV-studded zeppelins drift listlessly in the sky advertising exploitation of space as “opportunity and adventure” where the real work is done by synthetic beings cooked up by the not-too-distant future’s alchemy vats. Earth is a failed nation, a remnant ghetto, and L.A. is a pan-cultural massing point crammed full of people who cannot wait to abandon a sick planet for the Off-World colonies. Six “Replicants”—genetically engineered beings—have slaughtered the crew of a spaceship, commandeered the vessel, and piloted it to Earth, where their kind is outlawed. In space, they’re pimped out as warriors, whores, labourers, assassins—human simulacrums to take the edge off pioneering the cosmos. The Tyrell Corporation manufactures them; Eldon Tyrell (Joe Turkel) lives above the squalor in neo-Roman splendour, designing minds for his quite literal brain children.

The Replicants have a built-in failure date—a four-year lifespan—to prevent their developing emotions. But they’re also supplied with patched-in memories to help cope with the absurdities of their existence, Tyrell’s brainwave to stave off inconvenient behaviour. His greatest creation, Rachael (Sean Young), employed as PA-cum-showroom model, has no idea at first that she’s a Replicant because she inherited her memories from Tyrell’s niece. Out of the returned progeny, two are reported killed trying to break into Tyrell Corporation headquarters. A third, Leon (Brion James), is uncovered by the “Voight-Kampff” empathy test administered by Holden (Morgan Paull), a cop posing as a middle manager: Leon knowing he’s rumbled, shoots the cop and flees to join his companions, Roy Batty (Rutger Hauer), Pris (Darryl Hannah), and Zhora (Joanna Cassidy). They hide out in the fetid and decaying fringes of the city. Leon snaps photos, trying to prove his reality real, his memories more than the installed pentimento of some other failed life form.

The cruelty of empathy is used to separate the Replicants from the other humans, so the opening of Blade Runner zeroes in from godlike heights to an interrogation, a manmade man trying desperately to understand questions that he can’t answer— no one can—except through memory. You come across a turtle. You flip in on its back. It lies there baking in the sun. You won’t help it. Why not, Leon? Of course Leon has no empathy for a turtle. Does anyone else? Turtles barely exist anymore. Humans have eradicated them. Empathy is part of the human soul, but the human soul is also murderous, the intelligent will to take possession of and conquer a living space. The Replicants, unmasked, are gunned down: they’re regarded as insensate homunculi programmed to survive but incapable of actual humanity—“skin-jobs” as the coppers call them in the easy parlance of street-level problem-solving.

Parables immediately proliferate. Roy is charismatic leader. Their team any band of noir losers on the loose, illegal immigrants, or gang of revolutionaries. Baader-Meinhoff of the Off-World. Or are they pilgrims, come to bellow their rage at God? Either way, now on they’re on Earth, dispersed in strip joints and cheap hotel rooms. “Let me tell you about my mother,” Leon says with a hint of vicious humour before blowing away his interrogator. The Voight-Kampff test is the grim joke at the heart of Blade Runner: how much empathy do actual humans have when they’ve done this to their world? Philip K. Dick, author of the source novel, had the deepest distrust for the works of modernity. His Replicants were empty vessels, things mimicking humanity, soulless by-products of human narcissism, that he used to prod his increasingly deadened and defeated humans for signs of life. Some scifi scholars and critics initially objected to Scott and screenwriters Hampton Fancher and David Peoples revising Dick’s most fundamental point.

Scott, a boy from South Shields, has no such New World certainty about the difference between product and producer. His childhood vistas were factories on the land and ships on the Tyne, promising new worlds of opportunity and adventure. Father Frank, a merchant marine, actually got to ride off in them, leaving young Ridley and brothers Frank and Tony trapped in the mundaneness of post-World War II Midlands England. Small wonder Sir Ridley’s films are littered with men driven by vision beyond the limits of their class and society, angry men and women pushing against snobs and fools, furious at being told constantly they are worth less than others, many doomed to create their own hells in reaching for their paradises. His Columbus reaches undiscovered countries and brings terror and slavery in his wake.

Scott had been vaulted from salesman to auteur by his famous Hovis Bread commercial, a vision of an England at once confidently industrial and homey, fading into memory and purveyed through an advertisement in a vision powerful enough to seduce a nation. Here he sarcastically turns that inside out for a future where some company’s branding might be on your cells. As with his previous film, Alien (1979), Scott’s take on scifi sneered at the pristine, sleek, near-abstract landscapes of most ’60s and ’70s predecessors in the dystopian stakes, and merged instead the many faces of ugly modernity circa 1982—the bristling industrial landscapes of the Midlands, the fecund tumult of Tokyo and Hong Kong, the decaying grandeur of New York and Los Angeles’ art-deco structures, relics of the near past’s hymns for the near future, and the memory of cinema itself. Vangelis’s audioscapes slip between vistas of synthesiser spectacle and Kenny G saxophony denoting soulful ennui. Scott’s street thrums with the buzz and bleep and footfall of urban life stretched to the nth degree; preachers and cooks and child gangs, nuns and goggled coots and hookers, every breed of humanity mashed together and gabbling a new patois born of confused necessity. Super-skyscrapers house jerry-built offices and the jumbled paraphernalia of decades past—America has finally learnt how to recycle. The streets border dens of vice and verve, where music video lighting meets the teeming types and romantic-desolate nooks of the old Warner Bros. backlot. Police hover high above in their “spinners,” keeping a lid on things. Scott’s city functions, it throbs with life even as its fringes falls into ruin and abandonment: it is, to use that modern cliché, immersive in a way Hollywood filmmaking had scarcely been since the last giant, historical films of the 1960s. Small wonder a generation of writers, filmmakers, artists, left relatively cold by the disco-fantastic Star Wars (1977), suddenly saw their metier or were nudged toward it (or simply fell in love with its smoke-and-backlight patinas). Burton and Batman, the Cyberpunks, the maestros of 2000AD and Watchmen and many another graphic novel, Gilliam and Proyas and the Wachowskis and more, all finding a church to worship in.

The slaves are returning here from the newer New Worlds, groping for their Creators. Hard and resentful progeny, their superiority is innate, übermenschen with disinterest in your well-being so long as they’re staring down the face of accelerated decrepitude. The Blade Runner is called into action: streetwise, whisky-sucking, gun-toting Rick Deckard (Harrison Ford). Blade Runner, a great title, not from Dick, but from Alan E. Nourse, whose work The Bladerunner concerned futuristic eugenics. Deckard, for all his Phil Marlowe-isms exacerbated by the voiceover prone theatrical cut, is no mere generic caricature, but rather possesses the same boding melancholy that dogged Raymond Chandler’s original (Robert Mitchum, who had recently played Marlowe, was the early casting choice), the same beggared spirit that occasionally could only crawl into a hole after seeing humans wreak havoc on each other and sink into boozy oblivion. The cop who hunts Replicants has to be damn sure whom or what he’s aiming at: he balances on a very thin edge. “If you’re not cop, you’re little people,” bullies his old boss Bryant (M. Emmett Walsh), something to be stepped on, and he’ll make a point of stepping on Deckard if doesn’t get back in the game for this most important piece of housekeeping.

Deckard is first glimpsed as member of the flotsam, reading the paper, waiting for his place at the dinner trough and arguing with the chef. Blade Runner takes on an old genre trope—the burning-out of a man who tries not to be brutalized by acting as society’s janitor—and justifies annexing another, bygone mode of storytelling with a similar concern with a world grown chaotically, frighteningly complex with an attendant loss of moral reference. In addition, Scott’s sense of the visual lexicon of cinema has pursued the common roots of Lang’s influence on scifi and noir back to the dark-rooted Germanic traditions of Grimm and Faust and Hans Heinz Ewer’s Alraune, as much as to the Olympian references of Frankenstein, whilst the mental and moral texture is Sein und Zeit strained through an opium trance and a leftover volume of Omni.

The powerful spell of Blade Runner, and part of the reason why it’s often proven so divisive over the years, can be attributed to the film’s prizing of atmosphere and textured emotion above suspense and action. It could almost be called cinema’s first multimillion-dollar mood piece, or work of blockbuster scaled poetry. Until key action sequences late in the movie, the pacing is deliberate, almost sedate in places. Scenes ebb liquidly into the next. Dissolves slur time and distort process. Lighting and diffusion effects crumble the hard edges of technocracy into the flaking verdigris of hallucination. A surprising amount of Blade Runner is taken up contemplating Deckard in isolation—tired, melancholy, boozy, making a path through bustling, uninterested crowds, listlessly investigating, looking for connection in the midst of throngs—or else in refuge with Rachael (Sean Young), two lost souls trying to work out if they even have souls. One of the quietest yet most thrillingly intense sequences merely depicts Deckard doing a little business in his own apartment, using a computer to investigate one of Leon’s snaps. Deckard is displayed as intently for the audience as the photo is for him, Deckard’s need for the balm of scotch just after an encounter with Rachael on which Deckard’s clumsy attempt to adjust her to her new reality falls tragically flat. Deckard peers into an artefact that suggests dimensions to his prey he never conceived, a realisation provided by Rachael’s own pathetic attempts to proffer photos as proofs of existence. The mirroring qualities of his apartment and Leon’s hotel room are easy to read. Lurking somewhere in the photo is a tiny image, the face of Zhora, another target, an eerily beautiful woman captured in sleep and reflected through the play of mirrors: Blowup (1966) meets Laura (1946) in Edward Hopper land.

Deckard meets Rachael in Tyrell’s pyramid-palace, where she struts out of the shadows festooned in vintage Joan Crawford wear—ballooning pompadour and square shoulders. The hard edges of futurist ’30s fashion sarcastically declare Rachael’s robotic nature long before the Voight-Kampff test confirms it. Deckard’s first encounter with her, held at Tyrell’s whim, is part interrogation, part challenging flirtation. New frontiers in erotic contact await. Not that new; the Replicants have long been used as sex toys, but not with feeling. “Have you ever retired a human by mistake?” is the inevitable, needling, aggrieved question never answered. Deckard’s greatest moments of professional achievement will be shooting two automata that look and sound awfully like women. No matter the social value enforced by taking down Replicants, it’s a soul-killing business for the Blade Runner. Deckard schools Rachael in the dangerous intimacy of human sexuality, edged with threat and compulsion and brittle need and accomplished with language of desire dictated, recalling Marnie’s (1964) lessons in domesticity. Is the secret to the Blade Runner’s success dependent on the same quality he unearths in Replicants? Are Blade Runners in fact Replicants themselves, faux-cops given a mission, a memory, and pointed in the right direction? Gaff (Edward James Olmos), Bryant’s emissary, aging and stooped, watches Deckard go about his business with Mandarin remove, clad in fur coat and waistcoat and armed with a cane, the gruff sensei of some lost Kurosawa time-travel noir film. He twists bits of paper into origami sculptures that mimic the stuff of Deckard’s dreams, the artisanal, classical rhyme to the grander business of Tyrell, creating bodies and stuffing the minds of others into them. Does Gaff have access to Deckard’s memories, or is it merely the common lexicon of dreams, the stuff of human identity?

Are the human impulses in the Replicants the actual glimmerings of self-generating sentience, or are they the howls of their implanted memories, dictating behaviours, the ghosts of other beings crying out to make sense of their Frankenstein shells? Is there, in fact, a difference (pace fanboy logic and the disagreements of cast and crew) between the haphazard way they march toward sentience and the way people do? Deckard seems to feel everything, ink-pad for his age. Tyrell’s humanitarian brainwave, to supply the Replicants with transplanted human memories, is supposed to cushion the emotional agonies of his creations, but proves to be crueler; what more sadistic thing is there than establishing an identity for someone, only to be able to reveal it was fake? That’s the pain for Rachael, and also, eventually, for Deckard, for his own identity is questioned. The film’s most obvious irony is the lack of interest most people show when Deckard guns Replicants down in the street. Underlying this is a more interesting paradox: humans are at their most human when contemplating different life forms, in repulsion or joy. The innocence of animals stirs us more than the murderous extremes of homo sapiens. The Replicants, boy-man Leon with his quick panic, his grotesque child-sadist jokes (placing eyeballs on a frightened man’s shoulder), girl-woman Pris built to be a fantasy of vulnerable femininity and blessed with gifts of malevolent elegance, and the two beautiful warriors Roy and Zhora—all have been built to play parts, and they play them half-resentfully.

The great designers are as lacking as their progeny. J. F. Sebastian (William Sanderson), designer of eyes for Tyrell, has “Methuselah syndrome,” helping to make supermen but stricken by the body’s incurables, so he looks at once preciously boyish and wizened. Roy and Pris are touching in their precocious, harried need for each other; love is only a step away for these beings growing as fast as they are. But they are dangerous. Armed with adult bodies and minds, they are nonetheless governed by the eruptive, tantrum-throwing instability of children. Of course, they cannot become more than children, not with their life-span, so no wonder rage and frustration pulse under Roy’s sleek skin. Pris ensnares Sebastian, as doomed to die young and terminally lonely as the Replicants themselves, entering his cavernous enclave where he lives surrounded by perverse talking simulacra like some sickly Georgian princeling left to his toys and arcane arts, all too easy a mark for the Replicants in their ultimate goal of reaching God—Tyrell—and seeking extended life. Roy and Pris get along famously with J. F. because they can play with him, but beware these playmates when they find it’s time to leave the sandpit.

Blade Runner is a work with an unmistakable aura of heartbreak to it. Scott’s older brother Frank had died of skin cancer before production, and the feeling of the awful commute to and from his London hospital permeates the film’s overtones of romantic pessimism and ephemeral sense of both pain and pleasure as intense but fleeting phenomena. Scott’s ever-formidable sense of technique, sometimes purveyed without great interest in his subsequent movies, here connects vitally with the material. As per Elmore James, the sky is crying throughout the film. The first of the film’s two kinetic sequences, in which Deckard pursues Zhora through the city streets after finding her working in a cabaret, starts close to comedy. Deckard assumes a fey and nebbishy act a la Humphrey Bogart in The Big Sleep (1946) as an artist rights’ agent in order to approach her, and swerves into an extended, violent chase. Zhora attacks and nearly murders Deckard before fleeing into the night. Deckard pursues her and the scene becomes something of an epic travelogue describing life in Scott’s L.A. on its most fundamental level. The entire sequence is a masterful piece of cinematic composition and staging, but the very climax is perhaps the film’s high point and single greatest moment of Scott’s career: as Deckard’s bullets crash into Zhora’s body, ripping great holes in her, she stumbles heedlessly through plate-glass windows of the hermetic little worlds of department store displays, surrounded by mocking mannequins and through a cloud of fake snow, before collapsing. The swooning slow-motion photography and the squirming, mournful drones of Vangelis’ score mixed with a thudding heartbeat that throbs its way to a halt, finally concluding with Deckard standing in the midst of a fake snowstorm, contribute to this scene’s terrible, dreamlike power.

Hero and villain, Rick and Roy, swap places at intervals throughout the drama: by the end, hunter is hunted. We see Rick’s integrity and humanity, but when we see him do his job it’s jarring and distressing. Roy performs even crueler acts as he stalks this urban jungle because he is designed to be cruel, but we see he yearns to be more. He wants to save Pris, whom he loves like a boy, even as he contemplates his doomed love with a man’s despair. He is capable of relating to Sebastian and asking for his help rather than merely intimidating him. His confrontation with Tyrell, part angry teenage son, part avenging angel representing the misbegotten, reveals him to be enormously powerful, deeply conflicted, and filled with a rage that could crack worlds. Roy’s confrontation of Tyrell comes when he infiltrates the Creator’s apartment, thanks to J. F. and that metaphysically loaded pursuit, chess. Game coordinates and genetic science are each expostulated in rapid-fire shows of genius, the speed with which Roy cuts off Tyrell’s options in the game matched by the efficiency with which Tyrell explains how all attempts to reverse the Replicant death date fail, each process reduced to one of logical exegesis that leads to death. However, son has come to punish father if not learn from him, and after a moment of almost tender regard, Roy crushes Tyrell’s skull between his hands with exacting, punitive anger that cannot be expressed in mere impersonal killing: like Commodus in Gladiator (2000), Roy must reverse the act of creation in embracing his father and sucking away his life. This sequence sits at the heart of the film and of Scott’s oeuvre, love and hate in fearsome, consuming proximity, as is its opposite, seen in the film’s very conclusion, where an act of unexpected mercy preempts the murderous carousel.

Roy doesn’t accept Tyrell’s benediction, “You have burned so very, very brightly Roy,” though Tyrell’s statement is undeniable, because while Tyrell prescribes acceptance of death, Roy struggles like all living creatures against his limits and is particularly aggrieved when he knows how grave the limitations are, how filthy the requirements of him as an exiled warrior-whore. The alternation of hero-status between Rick and Roy resolves in Rick becoming the hunted, Roy, knowing he is dying, pursuing the little man who has robbed him of his only friend. Indeed, as he gives his crippled nemesis a chance to escape, perhaps Roy enjoys witnessing a creature’s frantic determination to live because he is experiencing life at its rawest. They are both soldiers exiled from normality by their jobs. Roy created specifically for such a purpose, has regrets having done “questionable things,” and Rick feels the same as skin-job assassin.

Blade Runner is the rare science fiction that, in spite of borrowing its structure from another genre, belongs entirely in its genre: the imaginative background and the tropes of world-building, the motivating McGuffins and their place in the story, can each only exist in the speculative frame it engineers. Yet Scott’s many past vistas lurk within the haute-futurism, and the film is, in the end, close to fairy tale, a small myth of life and death and being: small wonder Scott was to launch himself into the even more visually ambitious, and even less successful Legend (1985). Does Deckard’s unicorn dream signify that his memories are taken from Gaff, the seedy, lame, shadow-lurking cop who seems to resent his presence? Is Deckard an able-bodied replacement for that has-been? Again, does it matter? In Legend, the unicorns lurch out of the mist, embodiments of purity, the lost character of innocence and fecundity the characters in Blade Runner are all too cut off from: like Scott’s predecessor (rank nightmare) and follow-up (outright fantasy where light and dark war), Blade Runner is essentially mythos. Hues of poetic parable all but blaze as the film slips toward it conclusion.

The Bradbury Building, setting of storied noir myth DOA (1951) and the vital noir-scifi crossbreed in TV’s “The Outer Limits” episode ‘Demon with a Glass Hand,’ becomes the film’s hub, a decaying, septic trap of time and memory where the final, primal-accented battle will progress wildly through frames of culture, from Medieval gargoyles to Renaissance tangle to Georgian gilt to Art-Deco flare to punk grime. Roy, chasing Deckard through its bowls, similarly progresses from yowling wolf to hunter on the veldt to ironic sparring partner (“That’s the spirit!”), and finally, in his last moments, superman and then archangel. The finale again meshes references—Deckard’s dangling is Hitchcock’s Vertigo (1958), tötentanz starting point repurposed as awakening, whilst the chase through the Bradbury Building an explosion of Wellesian bravura while achieving its own singular, almost biblical gravitas. Roy must give himself stigmata to keep the game going, driving a nail through his hand to keep it operating, shutdown imminent but a revelation in the making.

We witness Roy transcend his programming, both Replicant and human, in saving Deckard, who in harming Roy, deserves to die more than any number of those Roy has killed. Roy demonstrates that he has learnt the value of life and has gained that elusive fire that has been eluding him and too many others: mercy. His famous final words, his personal poetry (honest-to-god science-fiction poetry) for the passing of a soul and all its witnessing, reports back on the wonders of the new frontier with the pride of a being who now sees his value. His vistas to behold are new, places beyond the reach of the squalid Earth. The best we can say about Deckard, and what Roy probably recognized in him, is that he is an understanding witness to transcendence, and now also a real man capable of love. Gaff acknowledges that he has “done a man’s job,” Gaff watching from the sidelines, presenting Rick with the gift of certainty that Rick, whatever his origins, is a man. But is it that Deckard fought valiantly that made him a man, or that, in the end, he saw its essential futility? In any event, he skips out with his synthetic lover to whatever future— be it in Lamborghini ad as in the verboten theatrical version or to the land of Nod—Gaff’s own, last totem of mercy is understood.