Movie Review by Bill Rendall |
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Blade RunnerRidley Scott, the director of Blade Runner, previously worked as a set designer for BBC television. He uses sets effectively in Blade Runner to create an unforgettable image of a decaying city. The sky is always darkened, either by rain clouds or residual fallout from a nuclear war. Night and day don't seem much different. Blade Runner is loosely based on the book "Do Androids Dream of Electric Sheep?" by Philip K. Dick. The book is set in 1992 but the date is advanced to 2019 for the movie. The Blade Runner screenplay deviates from the book in the treatment of the characters. Many of the main characters in the book are androids. To avoid negative connotations they are called replicants in the movie. This reflects their sympathetic portrayal. They are sadly aware of their short predetermined life span. Most of the humans in the movie are portrayed as less caring and less emotional than the replicants. The main human character, Deckard, is played by Harrison Ford and his emotionally restrained acting style is perfectly suited to the task. The only human character portrayed with sympathy is an outcast who has more in common with the replicants than with human society. The movie is let down by a muddled plot. A few years after the movie's original release an alternate "director's cut" was released but this didn't make the plot any clearer. The director's cut makes some improvements by removing an unnecessary voice-over narration by Ford and removing the Hollywood ending where the leading man and lady drive off together to presumably live happily ever after. This ending is not consistent with the dark tone of the rest of the movie. The ending of the director's cut is ambiguous and suggests that Deckard may be a replicant himself. Neither ending works for me. The real problem is that by the end of the movie I don't care much about what happens to Deckard anyway. Rutger Hauer has already stolen the show playing the dying leader of the replicants. "Do Androids Dream of Electric Sheep?" is a short book so I made the effort to read it in an attempt to better understand the story of Blade Runner. I am none the wiser having read the book but I note that there is no suggestion the central character is an android. There have been many attempts to make movies from Philip K. Dick stories which have not worked as well as Blade Runner. For example, the movie Total Recall is spoilt by an unconvincing portrayal of life on Mars. In Blade Runner the action all happens in Los Angeles. There are references to colonies on other worlds but the illusion is not spoilt by attempting to show these other worlds. The music for Blade Runner is provided by Vangelis. The doleful synthesizer tones complement the bleak atmosphere of the movie. This is an early example of synthesizers being used for a movie score, following Vangelis's Oscar winning score for Chariots of Fire the previous year. Scott has a reputation for editing movie scores as he sees fit and Vangelis was unhappy with the way his score was cut up for Blade Runner. Even so, I think the soundtrack works really well. The visual and aural components of Blade Runner are so effective that the flaws in the plot can be overlooked. Blade Runner oozes atmosphere and is a sci-fi classic. |
Director: Ridley Scott Screenplay: Hampton Fancher, Music: Vangelis |
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