Thanks, I Hate It: Blade Runner

Ridley Scott’s sci-fi classic has its high points. The intricate, grimy sets, Darryl Hannah as the repulsively, tragically vulnerable android Pris—whose hellish death scene still gives me the shivers two decades after I first saw the movie—and Rutger Hauer’s justly famous “tears in the rain” monologue are all fascinating cinematic landmarks. The problem is that once you move past the black ziggurats, the endless monotonous gobbling of the rain, and the hypnotic sprawl of an L.A. writhing in the death throes of a spent civilization, it’s all in service to a fundamentally uninteresting movie. 

“What does it mean to be human?” is a question art doesn’t need to ask. We all know. We’ve all stubbed our toes and had our hearts broken, lost loved ones and slept through alarms, and gone through the billion other workaday and earth-shattering experiences we share as a social species. Compared to that, the replicants and their struggles are pretty thin gruel. They don’t really interact with each other, and their physical perfection is a major stumbling block in casting them as a metaphor for the oppressed and dehumanized. Only the slow-witted Leon (Brion James) really comes off as someone struggling with his own nature, unable to function in a world that built him for one purpose and refuses to accept him in any other context.

It’s here more than anywhere that the film flounders. The moral abomination it presents—vat-grown people born to serve a faceless hyper-capitalist society—is less pressing, less visceral than the crimes on which Western civilization was built. It’s a metaphor for those crimes, to be sure, but a poor one. The sprawling inequality and misery against which the replicants’ struggle plays out amounts to little more than set dressing, and their uniform whiteness cuts off any resonance they might have to ongoing Western systems of oppression. No film needs to be praxis, but if it’s going to delve into what constitutes humanity then it pays to find ways to connect that investigation to reality, to cast a new light on the injustices we’ve lived beside unquestioningly. 

Blade Runner makes those injustices more comfortable, not less. It divorces its message from reality and reduces it to a masturbatory fantasy of perfected human life kept in shackles by creators at once jealous and in awe of their creations. For all the revolutionary beauty of its special effects—matte paintings and miniatures used with a finesse and seamlessness never equaled since—its soul is tepid, its emotional palette dully inscrutable. Should we make slave robots in our own image and then abuse them endlessly for pleasure and profit? Probably not! A referendum on the issue does not feel necessary! And Ford, for all that he’s very, very good-looking, is inert. From his affectless drinking to his limp action scene with Leon, he brings nothing to the material. How much more interesting might this movie have been with no Deckard, focused entirely on the replicants and their place in the world, their hunger for real lives and real love?

Then again, Scott has never had much of anything to say on his own. It was screenwriter Dan O’Bannon and art director H. R. Geiger who injected much of the wriggling, unseemly life into Alien, his only truly great movie. Gladiator, Kingdom of Heaven, and the rest of Scott’s featherweight historical epics present ideas about as meaningful as your alcoholic shitbag uncle getting teary-eyed about “freedom” at a Fourth of July barbecue. There, at least, the films themselves are bland and overcooked at every level, award bait for Academy dullards. In Blade Runner, with its intricately lived-in sets, downbeat synth score, and occasional flashes of white-hot human feeling, that lack of vision finally has a movie to squander rather than match.