Blade Runner
The Director's Cut
USA, 1982; Director's Cut, 1992. Rated R. 117 minutes.
Cast: Harrison Ford, Rutger Hauer, Sean Young, Daryl
Hannah, Edward James Olmos, M. Emmet Walsh, William
Sanderson, Brion James, Joe Turkel, Joanna Cassidy
Writers: Hampton Fancher & David Peoples, based on the
novel Do Androids Dream of Electric Sheep? by Philip K. Dick
Music: Vangelis
Cinematographer: Jordan Cronenweth
Producer: Michael Deeley
Director: Ridley Scott
Grades
Director's Cut: A+
Original release: A-
Review and analysis by Carlo Cavagna
Note: The analysis contains spoilers and is intended only for readers who have
already seen the movie. The review does not contain spoilers.
Review
efore Return of the Jedi and after Raiders of the Lost Ark, action-film icon
Harrison Ford made Blade Runner, a genre-defining science-fiction thriller with
echoes of old-fashioned film noir. Unlike many other science-fiction stories, which
look to the future with hope, Blade Runner adopts a gloomy, nihilistic view of what is
to come. Based on the intriguingly titled short novel by Philip K. Dick, Do Androids
Dream of Electric Sheep?, Blade Runner foresees a world ruined by economic and
environmental exploitation, inhabited by helpless, lonely people.
The year is 2019. Humanity is fleeing the polluted hell that Earth has become for new
colonies on other planets. Deep-space exploration and colonization is not easy. To
bear the brunt of the labors, powerful corporations have invented super-strong,
intelligent androids called “replicants,” many of whom do not adapt well to slavery.
After a bloody revolt, replicants are prohibited on Earth. Special police officers called
Blade Runners are charged with enforcing the ban. Harrison Ford is Deckard, one
such Blade Runner, brought out of retirement to hunt down four especially dangerous
newly-arrived replicants.
Predictably, the producers sought to capitalize on Ford’s previous successes by
marketing Blade Runner as a rock-‘em, sock-‘em flick. Blade Runner is no boisterous
romp, however. Taking no joy in its action sequences, the
melancholy Blade Runner has little in common with the Star
Wars and Indiana Jones franchises. The sense of humor Ford
displayed in those movies appears only once, when he
interviews a possible replicant while posing as a squeaky-voiced
member of the "Committee Against Moral Abuses." Instead,
Ford gives one of the first of his many quiet, understated
performances that would characterize his later career, including
such films as Presumed Innocent, Clear and Present Danger,
and The Devil’s Own. Among Ford's movies, Blade Runner
possibly has the most in common with Witness, in which Ford plays a police officer
drawn to a woman from a different world, where he finds all his assumptions
challenged–not unlike Deckard.
Director Ridley Scott brings the same patience, pensive tone, and metaphysical
themes to Blade Runner that can be found in his previous film, Alien. Characterized
by a recurring birth motif, Alien explored the concept of non-human life. Blade
Runner asks, “What is life?” more explicitly. Can artificial life forms have a
consciousness, or a soul? Blade Runner presents an answer, but introduces many new
questions along the way.
Fearful that the film was too impenetrable and uncommercial, the producers made
several changes to the theatrical release. They deleted a brief dream sequence, tacked
on a more positive ending, and, to make the story easier to follow, added voiceover
narration by Deckard, which Ford recorded under protest. The narration in the original
version does clarify certain points, but obscures others and restricts Scott’s vision.
Though Blade Runner did poorly at the box office (not even recouping its $28 million
budget in U.S. receipts), its merits were eventually recognized, and the Director’s Cut
was finally released in 1992. Narration-free, more ambiguous, and with the
implications added by the unicorn daydream, the
Director's Cut is a major, thought-provoking artistic
achievement, and a landmark in science fiction.
Analysis (contains spoilers)
ike most of the best science fiction, Blade Runner is
not really concerned with pseudo-scientific gobbledygook. Despite the presence of aliens, alternate realities, or
fantastical futures, the best science fiction asks, what does
it mean to be human? What is the nature of
consciousness? Of life? In exploring these issues, a
science fiction universe can have an advantage over a “standard” fiction setting,
because it gives writers greater freedom and a larger milieu in which to pose their
questions. The best science fiction investigates the essence of life using conflicts out
of the bounds of our contemporary world as a catalyst. (Star Trek also does this.)
Because science fiction is inherently speculative, sometimes one must forgive small
holes in a premise. It’s inescapable–even the most scientific science-fiction must
ultimately resort to the imagination to conjure up possible futures and technological
marvels. If you look closely, all science-fiction premises are flawed in some way.
Certainly in Blade Runner there are a few problematic questions. For example, why
must androids be subjected to a complicated emotion test to determine whether they
are human? Why isn’t a skin sample or an x-ray enough? A single scale and a
microscope is enough to determine that a snake is artificial. One could argue that the
androids are completely organic machines (the film suggests this, in fact), but that is
inconsistent with their immunity to boiling water or extreme cold.
Such small discrepancies exist in most science fiction, and they don’t really matter, as
long as the science fiction world remains true to itself once the parameters have been
established. Though there are those who would disagree, science fiction should not be
ultimately about the science, but about the thematic explorations permitted by
whatever imaginary setting the author has chosen. What matters is whether the story
yields answers that resonate as universal truths.
Blade Runner may contain discrepancies, but it is a sophisticated and complex film,
memorable both in style and substance. It’s important in the development of cinema,
too, because it is the first identifiable “cyberpunk” movie. Cyberpunk, a sub-genre of
science fiction whose stories usually feature computers and/or cybernetics, came into
its own with William Gibson’s 1984 novel, Neuromancer, in which Gibson writes
about things called “the net” and “cyberspace.” Although William Gibson himself
admits that he knew nothing about computers, he is credited by many with inspiring
the development of the internet into what it is today.
Blade Runner doesn't feature computers, but it does have cybernetic organisms
(androids, or “replicants”), and it shares with Neuromancer and most cyberpunk a
grim vision–a future world ruined by capitalism run amok. In the year 2019,
corporations seem to have replaced governments. Earth is an environmentally
degraded mess that people can’t wait to abandon in favor of off-world colonies. Note,
for example, how J.F. Sebastian (William Sanderson) is the only resident of his
apartment building. The only people left on Earth are the wretches who can’t afford to
leave and those who profit by exploiting them.
More than anything, the setting and visual style of Blade Runner influenced
cyberpunk–a genre which culminated on film recently with The Matrix. But the style
of Blade Runner was itself strongly informed by the classic film noirs of the 1940s.
The setting may be futuristic, but it is typical noir: the city at night. Director Ridley
Scott chooses darkness whenever possible, even during the daytime, and employs
classic noir contrasts between light and darkness–light shines through window blinds,
for example, and casts bar-like shadows against a character’s face. Blade Runner is
also a detective story. Like in a film noir, Deckard (Harrison Ford) works his case in a
seedy underworld and falls for the femme fatale. Deckard’s hard boiled narration in
the original theatrical release (deleted from the Director’s Cut), reminiscent of a pulp
novel, is another explicit feature of the noir genre.
Fear and paranoia is the essence of film noir. Such movies were most popular in the
1940s and early 1950s, when rapid technological advances after the atomic bombings
of Hiroshima and Nagasaki led to the chilliest era of the Cold War. Despite the
economic boom, the omnipresent threat of nuclear annihilation instilled a sense of
collective dread. Similarly, when Blade Runner was released in 1982, Reagan’s
Second Cold War was underway, and the United States was at the tail end of a
protracted economic recession, in which being eclipsed by Japan as the world’s
economic superpower seemed like a real possibility. In Blade Runner’s future,
Japanese businesses and culture have overrun Los Angeles, and the world in general
is a bleak, inhospitable place. Virtually all animals have died, leaving lonely humans
to design and build artificial creatures for companionship. Classic noir suggests that
increased industrialization breeds alienation, and in the hyper-industrialized world of
Blade Runner, this is especially true. Individuals are cogs, helpless and lost in their
urban environment.
If it had to be described with a single word, the film noir mood is best defined as
claustrophobic. Scott’s visual motifs enhance this mood. Everywhere, we see eyes,
creating an atmosphere of constant surveillance, like in Orwell’s classic novel 1984.
After the opening credits we see the flaming smokestacks reflected in an eye; eyes are
used in the emotion test to detect replicants; the replicants visit Chew (James Hong), a
genetic engineer who “only does eyes,” and before killing him, Roy Batty (Rutger
Hauer) remarks, “If only you could see what I’ve seen with your eyes.” Later, Roy
puts out Tyrell’s eyes. Scott also uses images of fans, also common in noir. In most
cramped, polluted urban noir landscapes, the fans are required for ventilation. They
are a visual symbol of the oppressive environment from which they provide a barely
adequate source of relief. (Similarly, fans would later be used in Alan Parker’s Angel
Heart as an ineffective remedy against the heat of Hell itself.)
Birds are also a common motif in Blade Runner. Nothing represents freedom quite as
well as a bird in flight, and nothing represents imprisonment quite as well as the same
bird caged. However, different birds appear at different times, each serving a different
function. Roy refers to “shores burning with the fires of a hawk,” a bird known as a
hunter and predator, perhaps meant to represent Roy himself. Instead, the dove
released by Roy when he dies symbolizes peace and, perhaps, his soul. Much earlier,
near the beginning of the film, there is an owl in the lobby of the Tyrell Corporation.
It’s a bird known for its large eyes (again, a symbol of watchfulness), and it is also
mechanical. As it flies across the lobby, its image is juxtaposed to that of Rachael,
looking like a flawless china doll as she walks out to meet Deckard. The message is
obvious: the owl is artificial; Rachael is artificial. (Owls are also a symbol of wisdom,
of course, which suggests that the replicants are in some respects wiser than humans;
more on that below.)
Deckard isn’t sure at first that the owl is artificial. He must ask. After all, the owl is
much more real-seeming than the statues of birds also found in the Corporation’s
lobby. Those are the artificial birds; surely this flying feathered creature is a living
thing. This contrast introduces the key conflict of Blade Runner. Can a replicant be a
conscious, living creature, or is it just a machine? What’s the difference between a
replicant and a human being? In other words, what defines life? It takes Deckard an
unusually long time to determine that Rachael is a replicant. “More human than
human is our motto,” comments Tyrell. A background advertisement during the
climactic scene between Roy and Deckard echoes Tyrell’s remark. It advertises TDK,
which makes blank video and audio tapes. Tapes are used for
duplicating–or perhaps, replicating–and the slogan reads,
“TDK–so real.”
Are the replicants alive? The empathy test used by Deckard
helps to answer to this question. It is designed to detect
replicants by measuring their emotional responses. This is
done by tracking the dilation of their pupils as they answer a
series of questions. Pupil dilation is affected by emotions.
Therefore, one would expect to find variations in pupil size
in a human subject and not in a replicant. Interestingly,
however, the replicants’ emotional responses during the test seem strong–stronger, in
fact, than those of a human being–and that’s what gives them away, not their lack of
emotion. Consider how upsetting the test questions are to the replicant Leon (Brion
James) in the opening scene. A hypothetical situation in which he refuses to assist a
helpless tortoise greatly distresses him, and, in response to a seemingly innocuous
question about his mother, Leon murders his interrogator.
Why the extreme response? As Dr. Tyrell (Joe Turkel) explains to Deckard,
“[Replicants] were designed to copy human beings in every way except their
emotions. The designers reckoned that after a few years they might develop their own
emotional responses.” They become like young children or developmentally disabled
humans when they experience anger or frustration, and don't know the proper ways of
dealing with strong feelings. Perhaps this is why Pris (Darryl Hannah) feels such
affinity for the developmentally retarded J.F. Sebastian (in addition to the other more
obvious reason, his medical condition that causes “accelerated decrepitude”).
Once the unnaturally strong replicants experience emotions, they become volatile and
dangerous. Therefore, Tyrell has incorporated a fail-safe device into the replicants: a
four-year life span. Tyrell is also experimenting with memory implants. Artificial
memories of a childhood and adolescence provide built-in experience in handling
emotional reactions–they supply maturity, in other words. Moreover, a replicant with
artificial memories would not know that it is a replicant. Unlike Leon and Roy,
Rachael is such an experiment, which is why Deckard has such a difficult time
establishing that she isn’t human. Because she believes herself to be human, she is far
more convincing.
In addition to their emotions, the replicants’ search for their Tyrell is further evidence
of their sentience. For millennia humans have posited the existence of a god or gods
that are responsible for creation and give order to their seemingly random lives. For
almost as long humans have questioned their gods. Various answers are found in
different religious texts, but there are very few who claim to have known God
directly–to have spoken to him, or to have experienced the divine. Unlike humans,
Roy knows exactly where his creator is. Tyrell lives in a building on Earth that closely
resembles one of the Toltec pyramids at Teotihuacan, in Mexico–a visual expression
of Tyrell’s godhood. Tyrell later refers to Roy as “the prodigal son,” further
underscoring his status as father and creator.
When they meet, Roy asks the same questions that humans have longed to ask God.
Why did you create me? Why did you design my life to be so brief? Can you not
show mercy? Can you not make things better? Roy has reached the point in his
development where he is wrestling with the same existential issues with which
humans struggle. Alas, nothing can be done about his four-year life span. Frustrated
by losing his last hope of changing his fate, Roy gets even by killing Tyrell, freeing
himself of god.
Rachael’s implanted memory of baby spiders hatching and eating the mother spider
foreshadows the result of Roy’s meeting with Tyrell, which serves as a warning not to
use technology and science to play god. Tyrell’s creation, a sentient being designed
only to make human life more convenient, has destroyed him. The replicants are only
seeking a place in the world, to be accepted and fit in, and to increase their life span to
a normal human length. They do not kill unprovoked. They are on a quest for life, not
death. For this, they are considered dangerous, and they are hunted and killed.
It is the humans who have a greater disregard for life. They have destroyed their own
world; they exploit each other, and, except for the child-like J.F. Sebastian (whose
innocence only highlights other humans’ deficiencies, and whose solution for
loneliness–literally making friends–contrasts with the manufacture of replicants to
suit more distasteful needs), they show no compassion for one another or for the
replicants Captain Bryant (M. Emmett Walsh) callously refers to as “skin jobs.” This
is not true, however, of the replicants, who protect each other, fall in love, and grieve.
Who is more “human,” the humans or the replicants? Like another unnatural,
emotionally immature (and therefore dangerous) creation, Mary Shelley’s
Frankenstein, the replicants are ironically the more noble creatures, vilified and
destroyed by those who misunderstand them. They are also slaves–note the heavy
irony in Deckard’s question to Zhora (Joanna Cassidy), as he is posing as a member
of the Committee for Moral Abuses, “Have you ever felt yourself to be exploited in
any way?” The replicants' fight for freedom, not unlike the struggle of slaves
throughout human history, is seen as dangerous and subversive by their masters.
“Aren’t you supposed to be the good man?” Roy asks Deckard. By whose twisted
definition is Deckard the good guy and not a ruthless murderer?
By the time Roy has disposed of Tyrell, Deckard has “retired” all Roy’s companions,
and Roy’s four years are almost up. Roy faces imminent death alone. His first instinct
is to avenge his friends by killing Deckard before he dies himself. But Roy has a
change of heart at the climactic moment. Having accepted his fate, Roy discovers an
appreciation for life that goes beyond the basic instinct for self-preservation. With
Deckard’s life in his hands, Roy spares him, exercising compassion that Tyrell did not
possess. In the last moments of his life, Roy has achieved emotional maturity and is
now fully “human.” His outward appearance has similarly changed. When Roy first
appears, he looks inhuman with his chiseled features and bleached hair, but at the end
he is wounded and bleeding, no longer a too-perfect physical specimen.
In his eloquent final words, Roy both mourns and celebrates his remarkable but brief
life. “Look at what I have done in just four years,” he seems to be saying to Deckard.
“Do not waste this gift I am giving you.” As Deckard listens to Roy and watches him
die, a look of understanding dawns in his eyes. Only then does Deckard fully
appreciate that the replicants are conscious, living beings. Only then does he grasp the
brutality of what he has done to other replicants. Deckard’s perspective has
completely changed from the beginning of the movie, when he comments to Rachael
(before discovering she is a replicant herself), “Replicants are like any other machine.
They’re either a benefit or a hazard.” “Have you ever
retired a human by mistake?” Rachael challenges him.
Rachael continues to challenge Deckard’s prejudices–
for that is what they are–throughout the story, laying
the groundwork for Deckard’s revelation. When
Rachael visits Deckard’s apartment after the empathy
test, for example, he cruelly informs her that she is just
a machine–one of Tyrell’s little toys. Then, when she
is visibly upset, he insults her by lying and saying that
he was just making a bad joke. Deckard immediately regrets it. As Rachael stands in
his apartment completely vulnerable and disillusioned, Deckard begins to see her in a
different light. He begins to feel pity, and he also finds himself drawn to her. Deckard
initially can’t accept that he is attracted to a replicant. Uncomfortable with his own
emotions, he treats her roughly, trying to provoke what he views as a human response.
This is not Rachael’s fault, of course. She has clearly exhibited emotions that can be
described as human, but Deckard does not yet fully accept her as a conscious
individual. The moment of tenderness at the piano, and later, when he is fearful that
Rachael is lying dead in his bed, show Deckard’s true feelings.
Deckard has hunted replicants all his life. His mission is to protect humans from
replicants. Yet here is a replicant who is for all intents and purposes human. Rachael
awakens Deckard’s protective instincts, and he begins to reconsider what he does for
a living. It’s not just Rachael that causes Deckard to reassess. For example, in Leon’s
apartment, Deckard finds photographs. Why would a replicant, one without memory
implants, keep mementos of his life? It’s another sign of “humanity” in something
that is supposed to be a machine.
Of course, Deckard doesn’t enjoy hunting down replicants in the first place, even
though he has been able to live with actions until now. Scott emphasizes the
distastefulness of Deckard’s job by photographing each death tragically instead of
triumphantly. Deckard’s dispirited reaction to Zhora death contrasts starkly with that
of Bryant’s jubilant response. When Bryant tells him that there is one more replicant
that he must retire, Deckard is even more unhappy, particularly when he learns that
Rachael is the target. In yet another irony, Deckard’s own life is saved not once but
twice in the film, both times by replicants.
Fearing that Ridley Scott's final cut of Blade Runner would be too difficult for
audiences to follow, the studio deleted Deckard’s unicorn dream, added Deckard’s
hard-boiled narration (which Ford recorded under protest–and it shows), and tacked
on a more uplifting ending that shows Deckard and Rachael driving off into the
sunset. (The Director’s Cut ends with Deckard and Rachael leaving Deckard’s
apartment and descending the staircase to make their escape.) Deckard’s narration
then suggests that Rachael may have no fail-safe, meaning that she has a normal life
span, and the happy couple can thus live happily ever after. The studio used extra
footage from The Shining to create the dreamlike landscape as Deckard and Rachel
speed off. Though beautiful, the addition of this footage is absurd, because we’ve
been told repeatedly that the Earth’s environment is hopelessly fouled, which is an
integral part of the story’s setting and context.
Deckard’s narration clarifies the plot, but it obscures many of the themes. It and the
deletion of the unicorn dream rob Blade Runner of its most interesting subtext–the
idea that Deckard may himself be a replicant. The most explicit evidence supporting
such a conclusion is Gaff’s message to Deckard at the end of the movie. Gaff (Edward
James Olmos) is a police lieutenant who works for Bryant and has a habit of making
tiny origami animals and leaving them at places he visits. He makes a chicken, for
example, and later what looks like a human with an erection, which is probably a
comment on Deckard's attraction to Rachael. When Deckard and Rachael leave his
apartment to go on the run, Rachael knocks over a tiny origami unicorn left on the
floor of the hall.
The obvious interpretation is that Gaff is telling Deckard that he’s been there, that he
knows that Deckard is harboring Rachael, and that he will allow them to make their
escape. But Gaff has already told Deckard this when he arrives at the scene of Roy’s
death and says, “I guess you’re through,” even though Gaff knows Deckard has not
yet “retired” Rachael. Gaff is then even more explicit, “It’s too bad she won’t live.”
The origami message is unnecessary unless Gaff is communicating some new thing.
Why did Gaff specifically choose a unicorn? Does he have knowledge, somehow, of
Deckard’s dreams–just as Deckard knows Rachael’s memories? If so, there is only
one possible explanation: Deckard’s memories have also implanted.
The implication could not be clearer: Deckard is a replicant, too. And why not? Why
should human beings risk life and limb in the dangerous task of hunting down
renegade replicants? Humans build replicants to do all their dirty work–why not a
replicant policeman? Of course, the replicant can’t know that he is a replicant, or he’ll
refuse to do his job. So, just like Rachael, Deckard is given human memories. To
maintain the illusion, they haven’t given him the inhuman strength that other
replicants have. This makes Deckard’s task of hunting outlaw replicants more
difficult, but who cares? If he’s killed, he can easily be replaced–right? Deckard could
easily have been activated shortly before the start of the story. Deckard is not actually
employed by the police department. He’s brought in when the previous blade runner
fails. Deckard has memories of having worked for the police and having quit, but
who’s to say those memories are real?
There are other hints that Deckard may not be human. The daydream of the unicorn is
juxtaposed with his photographs on the piano, suggesting that, like a unicorn,
Deckard’s past is a myth. In addition, in the Director’s Cut, we see red glints in some
of the actors’ eyes–like people might have in a cheap flash photograph. However,
only replicants ever display these odd red reflections–only replicants, and, during
Rachael’s second visit to his apartment, Deckard.
Then there’s an odd discrepancy. Bryant at first tells Deckard that six replicants have
escaped, and one has already been terminated. That should leave five. But then Bryant
shows Deckard profiles of only four replicants. Where is the fifth replicant? Later,
when Rachael turns up missing, Deckard has a total of five replicants to kill again, but
presumably Rachael is not the fifth replicant Bryant originally refers to. So who is?
Bryant can’t mean Deckard, as Deckard is the hunter. The issue is never resolved, and
the discrepancy may be simply an error, but it’s possible that it was inserted to make
us think that there’s another replicant somewhere that we should be looking for. The
uncertainty hangs over the movie, just like Rachael’s unanswered question to Decker–
“You know that test of yours? Did you ever take that test yourself?”
If Deckard is a replicant, there is an additional way to interpret Deckard’s rough
treatment of Rachael during their love scene. Presumably, Deckard would never have
experienced strong desire before. Deckard’s passion is so strong that even the cushion
of his fake memories isn’t enough for him to process the emotion in a normal way. So
he gets rough, initially, with Rachael. This explanation is not inconsistent with the
interpretation that Deckard is uncomfortable feeling desire for a replicant, because
Deckard believes himself to be human.
The possibility that Deckard is a replicant adds an extra dimension to the film, but it
does pose problems. For example, why would Tyrell create replicant blade runner to
hunt other replicants, also created by his corporation? Who knows? Perhaps the Tyrell
Corporation manufacturers whatever it is commissioned to manufacture. If Tyrell
Corporation replicants are destroyed, they must be replaced with Tyrell Corporation
replicants, which means greater profits. Or maybe Tyrell is obliged to produce
replicant blade runners to reassure the government that there is a safety net in place to
take care of any problems.
Certain questions must necessarily remain unanswered because Scott doesn’t want us
to know for sure Deckard is human or replicant. Had Scott explained everything, it
would have removed all doubts, and thus removed the intrigue of the Director’s Cut.
The theatrical release is a superior science fiction movie, but additional questions and
themes explored by the Director’s Cut makes it a masterpiece, and one of the most
talked-about science fiction movies of all time.
Review and analysis © April 2000 by AboutFilm.Com and the author.
Images © 1982 The Ladd Company and Warner Home Video. All rights reserved.