The Art and Beauty of Blade Runner (2015)(nappertime.com) |
The Art and Beauty of Blade Runner (2015)(nappertime.com) |
To me Scott's idea that Deckard is a replicant but doesn't know it is just weak. Even the idea that they would make a replicant hunter that's weaker than the "basic pleasure model" it's designed to hunt doesn't work.
I think Scott shoe-horned his change in after the fact and he's had to keep releasing new edits because it doesn't really fit.
PKD's original plot themes are much richer and deeper:
The purpose of this story as I saw it was that in his job of hunting and killing these replicants, Deckard becomes progressively dehumanized.
At the same time, the replicants are being perceived as becoming more human.
Finally, Deckard must question what he is doing, and really what is the essential difference between him and them? And, to take it one step further, who is he if there is no real difference?
— Philip K. Dick
Honestly, that is still what I get from Ridley Scott’s version.
I don't disagree with your points, but one explanation is that Deckard was made for the purpose of passing as human and had to be kept ignorant that he was a replicant as that would likely affect his job performance. If he was made stronger than other people, then it would have tipped him off as to his nature.
That does then raise the question of why Tyrell would present Rachael as being his most "human" creation unless he was testing/playing with Deckard to see what happens when replicants start to replicate.
So Deckard being a replicant operating on Earth is illegal; making his status as a replicant "obvious", by endowing him with superhuman traits (or even self-knowledge) would be ill-advised!
The effect used in at least one indoor scene, in which Harrison Food is filmed with his eyes glowing like the other replicants, is an in-camera effect and the decision to use it was made prior to filming.
Surely this is what the acknowledged replicants in the film do, particularly Roy Batty when he saves Deckard?
I was a great PKD fan (collected his books), and was a little disappointed when the film first came out, but it does grow on you.
felt like a huge component to drop out.
It's called O-Bi, O-Ba: The End of Civilization (1985).
Another thing that might amuse Blade Runner nerds is my attempt at recreating Blimp advertisement video - https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=VK1LJKtHj6Y
The audio consists of two parts: the wonderful minimalist score by Vangelis, and sound effects that include distant booms, twinkling computer notes, dripping rain, strange languages, the whoosh of futuristic vehicles, even small details such as the crosswalk warning. Along with the set design, photography, special effects, acting, and other visual elements, the audio effectively immerses viewers into this incredible world and story.
Keep in mind that a typical viewer entering the local cineplex in 1982 to watch Blade Runner might have just stepped out of a Chevy Nova with an 8-track cassette player loaded with Juice Newton and Kool & The Gang. The visuals, the score, the sound effects, and the story would have been completely novel, and totally mind-blowing.
In general there's also a problem that cinematography has gone to hell in filmmaking, because they want to be able to incorporate CGI more (cost) effectively and that means things like proper lighting and color grading is no longer utilized.
You might like this one.
"COMPUTER. ENHANCE." WAS RIGHT THERE!
Clumsy as fuck interface though, I'll grant that.
That being said, there are sequels for the original movie in paperback, which I've found to be very acceptable.
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Blade_Runner_2:_The_Edge_of_Hu...
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Blade_Runner_3:_Replicant_Nigh...
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Blade_Runner_4:_Eye_and_Talon
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I recently watched the Borderlands movie and while it had its obvious faults, the biggest flaw in my opinion was the jarring pace that one scene would switch into the next. That movie had a short runtime so could easily have been extended to let each scene breathe a little more and I think that alone would have drawn people in the world building a lot better.
I do think with SciFi, the world-building aspect needs to be front and centre, otherwise it’s impossible to switch off the “well that couldn’t happen in real life” part of your brain.
Watching the old movies today, I do think that the 70s films are too slow and 90s+ films too aggressive with cuts. Would be nice to balance, or have important scenes breathe while others get chopped. Most movies are too long these days as well.
The film itself was criticized as “Blade Crawler” back in the day.
Though I’m not disagreeing that culturally we have been on a steep downwards decline with regards to our attention span.
One of the examples I've seen goes something like: Wide shot of bank of elevators. Man walks up to elevator to push the button. Cut to close up of dial showing which floor the elevator is on showing the indicator moving back to first floor. A ding is heard indicating the elevator has arrived. Cut to wide shot showing doors opening, people exiting, man entering elevator. Cut to interior of elevator to see man choose floor and doors close. Now, you see the man walk to the elevator bank, hit the button, and then cut to the doors opening as man exits.
People usually do not remember what happened turn by turn but they do remember what it made them feel.
Funnily enough, in the movie, the humans have little no feelings but the androids do -- and that is the central question that the movie made me consider -- what makes us human.
I am ofcourse biased because Blade Runner (original) is not only on my top 5 scifi movie list but also on my top 5 movie list. So much so that I am reluctant to watch 2049.
I wish I hadn’t watched BR2049. Felt like a cheap parody, from the torrents of water falling on the windows, to the fake light effects, to the cartoonish villain who of course had to butcher a human-looking replicant while monologuing in order to get a proper introduction.
Harrison Ford is not very good in it—perhaps not a great actor generally. His pretending to be a nerd/fan in Zhora's dressing room is too cringey to watch it's so bad… I feel like I'm watching Mickey Rooney playing Mr. Yunioshi in Breakfast at Tiffany's.
And the actor that played Leon (Brion James) is also difficult to watch (he was a distraction in The Fifth Element as well).
My only complaints though.
Harrison Ford is playing Rock Deckard, a detective (not an actor) who hunts down artificial humans. At least to begin with, he and his fellow detectives don't have much respect for the replicants, so he thinks it will be easy to manipulate Zhora and get some information out of her before he kills her.
He's not pretending to be a nerd/fan. He's pretending to be a spineless small-time bureucrat doing an inspection that nervous with her.
I agree about Harrison Ford, though I don't know who would've done it better at that moment in history.
aside : The Fifth Element is considered to be one of the noisiest distracting sci-fi movies ever, so to hear your main distraction was Brion James made me grin.
Ridley Scott's idea of the scifi future being as gritty, ugly and dysfunctional as current times led to his creation of his two scifi masterpieces -- Blade Runner and Alien. The sequels have been disappointing, they had to be.
Scott never owned the rights to Blade Runner and wasn't heavily involved in 2049.
It shows. The script. The choice of actors. Clumsy scenes, like the fight scene at the casino with its stiff choreography. The pointless "virtual girlfriend" subplot. The location for the shoots (Hungary IIRC) which really limited the pool of extras - hardly a single Asian person to be seen.
Some of the people who worked on the film tried their best, including the CGI and set designers and the score (by Hans Zimmer) but I could only watch it once from beginning to end in IMAX. The second time at home I had to stop halfway through.
They may have a global tour of it in some places this fall.
Would love to experience the three *katsis in such a setting.
It was a cool experience to watch this on the big screen.
It's another of those movies which uses light extremely effectively, also.
In fact I've heard it said that every single shot in Blade Runner carefully deals with light specifically.
I think Blade Runner stands out for the visual effects though. The dystopian future cities were great. It were these effects packed into a storyline why I did not want to watch the "sequel".
The "Deckard is not a replicant" interpretation seemed like a heavier lift to me after the unicorn dream was included in the director's cut. But again, that's not Scott cynically changing the meaning of the film after the fact, as the OP suggested. It's him being allowed to present his own cut of the film after it succeeded in making money. (at least one of the producers thought the unicorn thing was Scott wasting their money on concepts he'd later use in the film Legend and so they left it out of the theatrical release, as was their contractual right)
I had to leave the IMAX showing of 2049, it was deafening (and I'm already hard of hearing!) Saw the whole thing in an ordinary non-IMAX theater, which was much more tolerable.
The one thing I did think the prequel movies did well, perhaps the only thing, was how it painted a world where absolute greed allowed an environment for space-nazis to thrive. Though real life sadly demonstrates that corruption doesn’t need to happen in the shadows to succeed.
The movie business is completely foreign to me, but I wonder if stuff like this would work: copyright owners licensing out their IP for niche studios serving niche audiences — I‘m pretty sure a lot of people would pay good money for a different take on the final GoT season. Or that third season of your favorite show that never came to be. A Thrawn-focused Star Wars trilogy. Various crossovers.
Assumed this would work good enough on a technical level any time soon — could it work in terms of licensing and economics?
Talking about a movie after having seen it, or reading online discussions with different viewpoints on it, like this thread, is my favourite part post-movie-watching. There'd be none of that if everybody makes up and watches their own version.
I don't remember him playing a heavy in The King is Alive, which is not a classic but a rather dark Dogme 95 film, of all things.
https://archive.org/details/DarkFiberWindowsMac/(WIN+MAC)%20...
We talked a lot but I resisted asking him to help with the plot of the game. I probably should have!
Did we watch the same movie? The opera singer was the ONLY character that wasn't slapstick...
Huh? Between Kassovitz trying to rob Corbin, the priest's sidekick, the head scientist, the archeologist with "Aziz, light!", the Chris Rock character, Corbins "fake wife" suggestion, the space port ticket counter gags, the president, and several others, the movie hardly has "few" slapstick outlets.
I watched the first Rambo very late, only about two years ago, and I was amazed at how much better the explosions look than in any movie I've seen in the past two decades. You can afford to actually show what's happening when it looks that good.
I've noticed a similar thing in martial arts movies. You can save a lot of effort and money with the quick, frantic editing. The alternative is that the choreography and cinematography have to be really on point. If you just shake the camera around a lot and do a cut every second, you can get away with amateurish fighters doing whatever, nobody will really notice.
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Runtime = scene length * content
Hell, "The Hobbit" is 3 overlong movies.
He is meant to portray him as a detective who is not that good with pretending to be someone else would.
Harrison might or might not be a good actor, but Deckard certainly isn't supposed to be a good one.
Why not? He's a seasoned detective with a track record, why's it so hard to believe he picked up some tricks?
The first theatrical release had a drab narration by Harrison Ford. At places it makes it sound like a cheap film noir detective story.
The Directors Cut is the unbutchered version.
Maybe 4D chess by Ridley Scott. Most had seen the optimized version first and was prepared for the magic which is the recut version ;-)
I have the opposite feeling with Apocalypse Now. The Redux version killed the pacing and explained too much. The added scenes are by themselves worthwhile (and explains later actions) but makes the complete movie a bit heavy handed.
By comparison Blade Runner feels more ethereal even though the both cover dark subjects of human nature.
The Director's Cut (released in 1992) drops the narration and adds the dream sequence, but despite the name is not entirely approved by Ridley Scott.
The Final Cut (released in 2007) is the only version where Ridley Scott had full final cut approval. It re-masters the audio, fixes some of the effects (replacing faces on stunt doubles, removing wires, etc), and changes a few lines (most notably "I want more life, father" instead of "fucker"). The color is also re-graded.
Some people prefer the Director's Cut over the Final Cut, especially the color grading, although I saw the Final Cut in 35mm when it was released and it looked pretty spectacular. In any event the changes in the Final Cut are nowhere near as egregious as the Star Wars special editions or the AI remasters of James Cameron's films.
I really wonder why some creatives are so determined to sabotage their earlier works later in life. Do they actually believe that they are making them better and are so used to being told how great they are that they can too easily dismiss anyone telling them otherwise? Or are they perhaps (consciously or subconsciously) threatened by a standard that their current self can no longer match up to?
It's sad that with the way copyright and movie distribution work that these butchered version become the only version new audiences get to see.
It may be trite but “Because if a machine, a Terminator, can learn the value of human life, maybe we can, too.” gets me every single time
Because, frankly, he may as well try not to kill Deckart, at all. For empathy. Or ask Deckart about how does he do, instead of going into monologue.
Before Blade Runner almost anything could be science fiction. After Blade Runner science fiction meant detective noir with #tech_upgrade - clones, memory implants, dystopia. Or it was US truckers and/or the military fighting nasty aliens in spaaaaaaace. (Star Wars and its magic space knights was always more fantasy with a science fiction stage set.)
Blade Runner did it far better than the others, but then we had decades of mostly mediocre book knock-offs, especially in the UK. (Gibson gets a pass for taking the new trope even further by being a brilliant stylist, mixing in some tech orientalism, and inventing cyberspace.)
It's a stunning, iconic masterpiece of a movie with an unfortunate chilling cultural effect.
And ironically the Philip K Dick original was... very different.
Gibson was horrified after walking out of a theater after seeing Blade Runner; in that Scott had visualized and shown onscreen the aesthetic of (at that point unpublished) Neuromancer.
Gibson was also writing in that vein long before the release of Neuromancer, which repurposes some themes, plotlines, and even characters from his earlier short stories. And my understanding is he was working on Neuromancer before Blade Runner was released and without knowledge of it during its production.
I will say I'm reading through his short story compilation Burning Chrome and it is amazing. I don't think he ever matched Neuromancer with his other novels and over time they've just exposed his weaknesses more and more, which is a bummer. But he's absolutely at the top of his game in short stories.
True. Ridley Scott and Philip K Dick collaborated very closely to tell it like they wanted it to. Studios liked it ... not so much.
Dick actually hated the first drafts of the script, which deviated even more from the novel. He was also upset that he was asked to write a new novelization of the script that would essentially replace DADoES in print. He made comments in the press about how Hollywood was ruining his book.
He really only changed his tune after his agent persuaded the producers to invite Dick to the set in 1981. He was basically coddled by Scott and his team (who was told Dick was creating bad publicity and needed to be assuaged) for a whole day, shown around the set and given a rough cut preview that included several major sequences and unfinished VFX by Douglas Trumbull.
After that, he not only spoke highly of the screenplay (which had evolved with the help of David Peoples, though it didn't exactly get more faithful to the novel), he wrote enthusiastically about how the film was going to change the science fiction genre for ever. Unfortunately, he never got to see the finished film.
If only.
None of these fit those tropes.
It didn't destroy anything; it just set a mold for the next few decades that was used to cookie-cut copies from. It cut a rut, and movie execs LOOOOVE a profitable rut to wallow in.
J.J. Gittes is also a seasoned detective, doesn't mean he would be great acting.
Actually, if he's a replicant made to believe he's human, he might even believe he was doing a good job, because he'd be clueless about what good acting is supposed to look like.
While trends are that movies are, on average, getting slightly longer, there are as many exceptions to that rule as there are examples of it, not just in the present day but also in the past too. And it can vary from genre to genre.
Also movie serials were actually the norm in early cinema. This isn’t some new trend invented by Jackson.
Examples of how the distribution is actually extremely varied: