Are You a Replican or a Replicant?

I have reviewed a number of sci-fi classics during my run on this site. They’re the films we all know and love, the ones that you can trot out again and again because they’re so good, so pretty, so impressive that the second they’ve ended you’re already thinking about putting them in and watching them again. I’ll admit I don’t even know if what I say for many of these films even matters. Do I have anything relevant or prescient to say on a sci-fi classic that hasn’t somehow been said dozens or hundreds or thousands of times before. I review them because that’s what you do, you post your reviews of Star Wars and Jurassic Park and The Matrix as a kind of litmus test so that others can see your thoughts and see if they agree with you. It’s not so much about the review itself but how your thoughts align with everyone else.

Well, I will tell you right now that I do not align with everyone else when it comes to Blade Runner. I really don’t like this movie at all. Ridley Scott’s 1982 sci-fi film was released to general audience disinterest, all but bombing in the theater. It only made $41.8 Mil against its $30 Mil budget, losing the various studios attached a fair bit of money. Eventually, though, it went on to find its audience on home video, eventually leading to multiple re-edits by Scott to make the film more into his original vision (and not the one imposed by a meddling studio). It’s now considered a cult classic, and even has a string of sequels (which, themselves, have struggled to grab ahold of audiences).

Honestly, I can see why audiences turned away from this film. While it has very pretty visuals, and presents a city unlike any that had really been seen in theaters before, there’s not much of a story linking it all together. It’s too slow, too plodding (especially in the director-approved Final Cut) and it just doesn’t live up to the expectations set by its visuals. Blade Runner is kind of a bloated mess of a film that somehow has become greater than, in my opinion, it has any right to be. It’s an unpopular opinion, I know, but it’s where I’ve sat with the film every time I’ve watched it (and I’ve seen it three times now, hating it every time).

The film is set in 2019 Los Angeles. There we meet Rick Deckard (Harrison Ford), a “blade runner” who works tangentially alongside the cops. Blade runners track down fugitive replicants, human clone-hybrids that were designed to work on distant planets and space stations before their whole program was shut down (after a few replicants decided to start a mutiny and killed a bunch of people). Replicants are expressly forbidden on Earth, so when four of them arrive and start causing problems, Deckard is (forcefully) assigned to the case.

As it turns out, the replicants are on Earth for a specific reason: they want to meet Eldon Tyrell (Joe Turkel), the creator of replicants. Through his company, Tyrell Corp., Eldon has continued working on and perfecting replicants. He’s even created one that seems indistinguishable from actual humans: Rachael (Sean Young). The replicants want Tyrell to find a way to extend their life past their seemingly arbitrary four-year lifespans, and will stop at nothing to get what they want. Deckard has to find them – Rutger Hauer as Roy, Daryl Hannah as Pris, Brion James as Leon, and Joanna Cassidy as Zhora Salome – and kill them to fulfill his contract.

The first issue I have with the film is that I don’t really care about any of the characters. Deckard is a barely sketched private investigator in a film that desperately wants to be a sci-fi noir, and that would work if we actually got anything out of Deckard. Harrison Ford is usually pretty good, but he has to care about the material and I never really got the sense that he did here. His Deckard is a watered down version of Han Solo or Indiana Jones, just lacking any of the charm of those characters. If the hero were more interesting, I’d likely care… although having villains that were interesting would also help matters.

The replicants are even less sketched out than Deckard. Pris has some gymnastics skills for some reason, and Zhora works at a burlesque club, but none of the four have real personality. The best of the set is Roy, but he doesn’t really get to shine until the last action sequence of the movie, and that’s when the character finally comes to life. Up until then they’re all just generic bad guys doing… well, not even really that bad of things. They just exist so Deckard can chase them, and Deckard chases them because they exist. That is not the strong basis for a story.

That’s just it, though: that’s the whole story. Oh, there are hints about something more going on beneath the surface, like how Deckard may actually be a replicant himself, but these hits are so subtle I doubt most people would even pick up on them (and that’s even after Scott had his chance to make the best edit of the film he could with this Final Cut). It’s subtext beneath subtext which doesn’t affect the main story in any real way. Is Deckard a replicant? Maybe. Does it matter to the story? Not in the slightest.

That doesn’t even get into one of the sketchiest parts of the story. Deckard and Rachel start circling each other (because in a neo-noir there’s always a “skirt” that spells bad news for our protagonist detective), and eventually he has her at his place. She tries to leave, he won’t let her, and eventually he, in effect, rapes her. Now, he does this by making her say that she wants it and she wants him, but it doesn’t change the reading I had on the scene and that reading is pretty icky. Ford was 40 at the time of filming, Young was 23, and if we’re going to debate the subtext of things, having an older man forcibly coerce a much younger woman into sex, replicant or not, ruins his character. And that says nothing about how these kinds of relationships were all too common in Hollywood movies for decades.

About the only thing I really liked in the film were the visuals. Blade Runner paints a very lived in world without having to explain too much via text or dialogue. The future of Los Angeles is that of a decaying mega-city, filled with people, packed with technology, but also slowly dying from the inside out as the city rots away. It’s the kind of striking visuals that could, and did, inspire plenty of other artists to make their own sprawling mega-cities in their own movies. I love the look of the film, scene by scene, I just can’t stand the actual story.

I know Blade Runner has its defenders, and I’m not here to say they're necessarily wrong. Just because the film didn’t work for me doesn’t mean it can’t work for anyone else. Maybe others see nuance and deeper meaning in scenes that did nothing for me. Still, I have tried with this movie three times now, across various different cuts (theatrical, Director’s Cut, and Final Cut) and I’ve disliked it every time. I have to admit that I do not like this film and do not want to watch it again. Thankfully, now that I’ve reviewed it for this site I don’t ever have to touch it again. I can breathe a sigh of relief over that.