Synopsis
In Los Angeles – overcrowded and choked in pollution - of the year 2019, the Tyrell Corporation leads the field of robot design with the “Replicant,” a being virtually identical to a human, but superior in strength and agility, and at least equal in intelligence. After a mutiny in an off-world colony, Replicants have been declared illegal on Earth, where they are tracked down and “retired” by special police called blade runners. One of these blade runners administers an empathy test known as the Voight-Kampff to Tyrell employees in an attempt to screen out Replicants. One of his test subjects - Leon (Brion James) - is pushed too far by the test and shoots the officer.
Ex-blade runner Rick Deckard (Harrison Ford) is summoned by his old captain (M. Emmet Walsh) to hunt down four Replicants – two male and two female – who have returned to L.A. for reasons unknown. Paired with a cop (Edward James Olmos) who speaks in an amalgam of French/German/Hungarian known as “Cityspeak,” Deckard goes to see Dr. Tyrell (Joe Turkel). He learns that the new Replicant – the Nexus 6 – has been implanted with memories and may even believe it’s human. Designed to develop its own emotional responses, the Nexus 6 has been engineered with a 4-year life span.
Tyrell has Deckard administer the Voight-Kampff Test to his secretary Rachael (Sean Young). Deckard realizes that she’s a Nexus 6. Rachael does not react well to news that she’s an artificial being and seeks Deckard out in an effort to cope with this. Meanwhile, the other escaped Replicants – combat model Roy Batty (Rutger Hauer), assassin Zhora (Joanna Cassidy) and pleasure model Pris (Daryl Hannah) – have befriended a lonely toymaker and robotics designer named J.F. Sebastian (William Sanderson) in attempt to infiltrate the Tyrell Corporation, seeking reprieves on their lives and the meaning of their existence.
Production history
After struggling as both a flamenco dancer and a screenwriter, Hampton Fancher thought he would take a shot at being a film producer. He recalls, “And this guy – Jim Maxwell – who’s a close friend, knows me well, said, ‘I think science fiction’s gonna happen.’ And he said, ‘Do you know who Philip K. Dick is?’ I said, no. He said, ‘Well there’s a book called Do Androids Dream of Electric Sheep?’ And I said, okay, I’ll read that. I read it. I didn’t like it that much. But I thought, okay, that’s commercial. Here’s a thru-line: bureaucratic detective chasing androids.” By 1978, another friend of Fancher’s named Brian Kelly had $5,000. They used it to option Dick’s 1968 novel.
Kelly approached producer Michael Deeley with the property. “I’d been pursued for about two years by Brian Kelly – who’s a very close friend of mine – who had this idea in mind to make a movie, based on Dick’s Do Androids Dream of Electric Sheep? And I first read it and thought: this wasn’t very interesting.” Fancher’s vision for the film was cerebral and dialogue driven, a cautionary tale of global pollution and over population that largely took place in rooms. He wrote a treatment, then several drafts of a screenplay. Deeley didn’t like the script much either, but was growing interested. After multiple rejections, he finally agreed to produce the film, opting for the title Dangerous Days. His choice to direct was Ridley Scott.
Deeley visited Scott in England while he was mixing Alien in 1979. Scott had committed to directing Dune for Dino de Laurentiis next and turned Deeley’s offer down. Scott recalls, “I was attracted to Dune because it was beyond what I’d done on Alien which was kind of hard core, kind of horror film. And Dune would be a step – very strongly, very very strongly – in the direction of Star Wars.” But Scott’s friend and associate Ivor Powell read Dangerous Days and found it “powerful and emotional and really interesting.” The idea stuck with Scott and when he was unable to figure out Dune, agreed to direct Dangerous Days. Fancher had never cared for that title, and appropriated one from William S. Burroughs that he liked better: Blade Runner.
Filmways agreed to finance the budget, but Deeley recalled, “We’d spent about two and a half million by the time it became perfectly clear that the world we were building was much bigger than twelve and a half million. Much, much bigger.” As sets were being constructed, Deeley brokered a three-way arrangement to secure alternate financing and keep the project alive. Producer Alan Ladd Jr. – who had a deal with Warner Bros. – put up $7.5 million for U.S. distribution rights. Singapore movie mogul Sir Run-Run Shaw also invested that sum, for the film’s foreign rights. Another $7 million came from producers Jerry Perenchio and Bud Yorkin, who received TV and home video rights and agreed to finance the completion budget.
Dustin Hoffman spent months attached to the role of Deckard, but with the star was pushing for a more socially conscious movie than the filmmakers envisioned, Harrison Ford was offered the part instead. During this time, Hampton Fancher was struggling to conceptualize exactly what Ridley Scott wanted to see. Scott recalls, “The hunter falls in love with the hunted, except they never go outside the apartment. It’s very interior. I want to take them outside the door. Once we go outside the door, this world has to support the thesis that she’s android, humanoid, robot.” David Peoples was approached to replace Fancher and deliver a shooting script. One of Peoples’ contributions ended up being the idea that Roy Batty would save Deckard’s life.
With conceptual designer Syd Mead creating the industrial look of the film – cars, streets, buildings and neon – Blade Runner commenced shooting on the Warner backlot in Burbank in March 1981. Working in the American film industry for the first time, Ridley Scott commented, “There’s nothing worse when you’ve done two and a half hours of commercials - and I know I’ve got a very good eye - in three seconds I can give you a set-up, having walked in the room without ever seeing it before. So I don’t like discussion. I know exactly what I want, and I want to walk in and say ‘Do it.’ That’s the director’s job. The director’s not meant to stand there and consult with half a dozen people in the room.” In addition to Scott’s communication skills, filming nights under heavy rain and smoke effects wore down the crew - many of whom quit – as well as some of the cast, with Harrison Ford seething through most of the shoot.
A test screening of Blade Runner was held in Dallas in March 1982. Production illustrator Tom Southwell recalls, “Everybody was expecting a heroic follow-up to Raiders of the Lost Ark or Star Wars and the way it was advertised on television - with only the visual effects shots of a flying car going over a futuristic city and sort of a fight sequence - doesn’t prepare you for the traumatic, emotional side that there is in the film that kind of leaves you sort of broken.” Specific objections raised at the test screening were that the film was too confusing, too dark, too slow and ended too abruptly. Scott addressed these concerns by filming a brighter ending, with Ford and Sean Young escaping to the pristine countryside, and inserting voiceover narration by Ford to help audiences along with the plot.
In June 1982 during its first weekend in theaters, Blade Runner opened well; only E.T. was drawing a bigger crowd. But as word of mouth spread - and audiences flocked to Rocky III or Star Trek II - the film’s commercial prospects sank. Grossing $32.6 million in the U.S., Blade Runner was deemed a failure. But those who were wowed by the film couldn’t stop thinking about it. Many more who discovered it on video became fans. Blade Runner went underground, where it became a staple of midnight screenings on college campuses and revival houses. As interest in the film continued to build, Ridley Scott was permitted to supervise a “Director’s Cut” which was given a limited theatrical release in 1992. His alterations included removing the voiceover narration, cutting the happy ending and adding 12 seconds of Deckard dreaming of a unicorn.
In addition to audiences who had missed it, critics who’d given Blade Runner a lackluster appraisal started coming around. By 2007, Roger Ebert – who wrote in 1982 that the film “looks fabulous, it uses special effects to create a new world of its own, but it is thin in its human story” – had added Blade Runner to his list of Great Movies. Special effects supervisor Douglas Trumbull summed up the film’s appeal: “We’re in a movie business where most movies are disposable commodities. They’re the summer blockbuster. I’m not going to name what they are, but they come and go in weeks and, bye bye. Nobody wants to resurrect them. Nobody wants to see them again. So the ones that are really truly well made - the kind of Casablancas of science fiction - survive, and get seen over and over.”
Opinion
Instead of reassuring the audience with a hopeful vision of the future, Blade Runner is an emotional downpour. The atmosphere is choked with smoke and rain. Animal life is endangered. The background dialects are impenetrable. Citizens with the means have fled Earth. Those who’ve stayed behind struggle to relate to each other as humans because in the film’s vision of the future, we’ve replicated life beyond the point to retain what it means to be human. The strengths and weaknesses of Blade Runner come down to it being one of the grandest art films of all time, second only to 2001: A Space Odyssey. The story never adheres to a straightforward detective mystery. Where the Replicants are or how Deckard finds them is the least interesting business in the picture.
What Fancher and Peoples do so well in their script is pose questions about what it means to be human, and where we might be headed if we continue to lose sight of that. Rutger Hauer, Brion James, Daryl Hannah and Joanna Cassidy perform some of the finest work of their careers as the Replicants – the real heroes of the film - as does Harrison Ford, who brings the right amount of downbeaten sleaze to his role. The film is deliberate and comes close to paralyzing the viewer with stimulus overload, but Scott’s eye for detail and his design genius are never in question. The evocative cinematography by Jordan Cronenweth and haunting electronic score by Vangelis add immensely to the film’s stature as a classic.
Brett Cullum at DVD Verdict writes, “Blade Runner itself remains an amazing ‘ahead of its time’ feature that has only grown more fantastic as time marches on. The film still looks fresh even with all the ’80s trademark stylistic choices, and it still resonates because it is great science fiction. 2019 will be here before we know it, and certainly in a few years we won’t be sending robotic slave labor to build colonies throughout space. But what Blade Runner says about what constitutes a soul is still as powerful today as it was back then. The difference is more people respect the film than when it arrived in theatres back in ‘82. If you need proof, just look at all of these sets around of the movie. It’s about time.”
Eamonn McCusker at DVD Times writes, “Few films present so complete a world as Blade Runner. It may not be very much more than a noir thriller in the very near future but each viewer has taken something more away from it, something that has left Blade Runner amongst the few films that are of such a sizeable cult that, occasionally, it threatens to tip over into the mainstream. Personally, my love of the film comes with the very things that Blade Runner was so criticised for, its funereal pace, its sacrificing of character for style and its sense of the Los Angeles of the near future being an alien place … The Los Angeles of 2019, though now destined never to pass with any accuracy, is bleak, unsettling and inhuman. It takes the passion exhibited by the Replicants to bring it to life.”
