directed by Ridley Scott
screenplay by Hampton Fancher and David Peoples
after the book Do Androids Dream of Electric Sheep? (1968) by Philip K. Dick

Another one that I saw not so much because I wanted to see it, but because everybody else has seen it, and enough is enough.

Most of the movie is about the production design, which is pretty impressive, in that comic book way. This particular brand of “wet grimy computer buildings” has pretty much gone on to become its own pulp industry. I don’t know that it all stems from this movie – probably not – but the movie is certainly a major milestone in the cultural development of “wet grimy computer buildings,” and it did come off as an important “text” to know, in that respect. Blade Runner may not contain the entire genome of futurist urban sci-fi noir, but it’s early enough and famous enough that I’m tempted to take it as spokesmovie for the genre.* Tempted, but not convinced, because it wasn’t that good. The conceptual (and visual) space in which the movie takes place has obviously been assembled with love, but the plot and pacing seem to have been worked out with relative disinterest, or perhaps in confusion. The noir playbook seemed to have been on hand but unread. Harrison Ford apparently has said something disparaging about the movie to the effect of “I played a detective who didn’t do any detecting.” He’s right – it’s not a mystery movie. It could maybe have been a sci-fi movie, but since it’s played as a mystery movie, it ends up not really being an anything movie. I haven’t read the Philip K. Dick original, but I gather that it’s not nearly as “noir” as this movie attempted to be. There’s an inherent worldview conflict between Dick’s swirling paranoid mysteries and noir’s weary hardened grimness, and it wasn’t resolved. By the time the bad guy was trying to kill our hero, then saving his life, then dying quasi-tragically, I knew we had truly lost our way – the movie didn’t know what it was about.

I saw the “Director’s Cut” version, in which one is supposed to wonder, at the end, whether maybe Harrison Ford is himself a doomed android. That this suggestion is neither surprising nor interesting – basically, it’s just another option out of the box of fictional options – is evidence that the movie hasn’t done its job.

The first shots are long-shot miniatures of the city, spewing industrial fire and looking generally like cyber-hell. Vangelis is on the soundtrack making his synth go “vwaaah.” We are meant to be awed by this vast alienness. This endless nightmare is now the world: VWAAAAH! It made me happy, somehow. Movies nowadays try to pull that kind of fantasy establishing-shot awe all the time, but they never manage it with as much force as they did back then. For one thing, miniatures and matte paintings are scarily tactile in a way that CGI will never be. For another, what then was an actual motivated directorial idea (“Let’s start with an awe-inspiring shot of the whole city”) is now enacted only as a category of cliche (“Let’s start with one of those awe-inspiring-shot-of-the-whole-city things.”) This silly example maybe informs the old question of whether it’s arbitrary to value creative ideas more when they’re new than when they’re widespread and familiar – sometimes the familiarity is not just historical fact but also inherent in the execution. That is, it’s not just that we get numb to things as they become customary – they’re actually handled differently. In this case I think the most quantifiable differences were that the shot was held much longer than it ever would be today, and that the soundtrack went straight for the gut of “cosmic awe” in a way that, I think, contemporary audiences would consider embarrassing or over-the-top. That’s most likely because neither they nor contemporary Hollywood believe that anyone will experience actual raw naked awe by just watching a fantasy movie. That’s an old-fashioned kind of goal. Old-fashioned like 1980.

I don’t know if you were aware, but Daryl Hannah has designed two board games.

Cover of the first edition of the book upon which.

* Always shocking to realize that a thing made since my birth was an “early” example of anything.