No more can I say
Written: Jun 05 '00
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Product Rating:
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Pros: Plot-driven sci-fi with characters you sympathize with in spite of yourself
Cons: No city has ever changed its appearance that much in a scant 37 years
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| thewasp's Full Review: Blade Runner |
If "Mission to Mars" is a too optimistic vision of what the world will look like in twenty years, "Blade Runner" is probably too pessimistic. But that is not a con. You can't even say that the film is being pretentious when no one knows quite when we will be able to clone human beings, which was the reason I sat through it for a philosophy class in 1985, back when bioethics was an emerging field. Since then, it has become one of my all-time favorites, and I think it would get a young person (I was going on thirteen) turned on to science fiction even if he or she wasn't already.
Rick Deckard (Harrison Ford) is the main character of this movie. Technically he is a retired police officer, but what is true on paper is not true anywhere else; his former boss coolly informs him he will be killed if he does not return to work. Being killed and retirement are synonymous in the case of the Replicants, the artificial people designed by all-powerful tycoon Tyrell to be more human than human. It is Deckard's job to "retire" them when and if they appear on Earth, on whose offworld colonies their labor has made Tyrell and a few others fabulously wealthy.
The best performances in the film are turned out by Rutger Hauer, Daryl Hannah, Sean Young and the other two actors playing Replicants. Hauer's in fact was so compelling that he was for a few years in demand to do action movies continuously, and Anne Rice even has her characters in "Queen of the Damned" watching "Blade Runner" and comparing his character, Roy, to Lestat (a comparison which Rice drops when she has Lestat meet God without trying to kill him, but I digress). The Replicants' emotional reactions are intense, once they admit to themselves they have emotions (Sean Young has the hardest time in this regard). Emotions of course are what make the Replicants dangerous, as well as being more than machines -- an admission with which Deckard has the hardest time. The other four humans who identify the Replicants for what they are have mixed reactions in the brief time before they are killed.
Deckard, for his part, has the stuffing beat out of him by each and every Replicant except Rachel (Sean Young), which makes you wonder not only how good he really is at his job, but how he lived long enough to get such a reputation. His final encounter is with Roy, who establishes first his physical, then his moral superiority over this pitiful man by saving his life in time to let Deckard watch him die. Deckard mourns, as does the audience, and resolves to leave Los Angeles forever in order to protect Rachel, whom he loves.
Recommended:
Yes
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Epinions.com ID:
thewasp
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Member: Jason Galbraith
Location: Little Elm, Texas
Reviews written: 374
Trusted by: 63 members
About Me:
I am now a legal assistant working at a nonprofit which helps battered women.
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