How To Love Blade Runner

Blade Runner opens with flare stacks burping flames over the LA skyline. It’s 2019 and this is a polluting and unpleasant future. But it’s also not traditionally dystopian — there’s wonder in Vangelis’ opening theme. The slow journey toward the giant Tyrell Corporation ziggurat is unequivocally an image of awe. This isn’t a world that’s over. Great and terrible things are happening. An eye opens and comprehends. There’s so much to love about Blade Runner.

I love imagining the Tannhäuser Gate, maybe the most evocative bullshit sci-fi name in movie history (named for a German poet who inspired a Wagner opera). A stargate? An alien construct? What made that gate remarkable enough to be a star-hopping replicant’s last wistful recollection? Have I ever seen anything as beautiful?

I love that we don’t first hear of the Voight-Kampff test, but “an empathy test,” dependent on subjective measures like “capillary dilation of the so-called blush response,” as prone to operator error as a polygraph and providing no definitive measure of replicant and human. I love the tortoise question that upsets Leon so much (and I love Brion James) and that Rachael’s Voight-Kampff interview is a consecrated ritual, with holy music and the dimmed sky, like an Egyptian sun ceremony from thousands of years ago.

With Blade Runner 2049 coming out Oct. 6, the original Blade Runner will be amply applauded. Not only is there a broad critical consensus that Blade Runner is one of the best science fiction movies ever made — if not the very best — but now that sentiment will have the full backing of the Warner Bros. marketing department. Still, there’s a large subset of movie lovers for whom these efforts will feel like tribute to a hollow idol. In my experience, Blade Runner is one of the movies most likely to be described as “overrated.” It’s boring. Overwrought. The characters are either unlikeable or the acting is bad. Even its defenders sometimes slip into, “well, it had more impact in its time” explanations, shoving Blade Runner up on a shelf alongside Doctor Zhivago. I disagree on all counts, but can only explain why it’s loved.

Watch the Director’s Cut or Final Cut. The differences between the two are mostly interesting to pedants and A/V perfectionists. Prefer the Director’s Cut if you find Lucas-y, finicky meddling by directors over-involved in their younger selves annoying — despite the name, it’s the less Ridley Scott legacy-polishing of the two. Both are superior to the theatrical version, which transforms Blade Runner into a kitschy noir pastiche.

Just as a visual and aural production, Blade Runner earns the future’s attention. The aesthetic joy is outrageous. Its immense miniatures and matte paintings earn it the same right to examination in long, loving shots as 2001: A Space Odyssey, though to other ends than awe and sublimity. Just look at Star Trek: The Motion Picture, with its interminable sweeping shots of the Enterprise, for a demonstration of how hard won Blade Runner’s stately, entrancing qualities really are. But to defend Blade Runner on production design and music alone would be small, because Blade Runner deploys its mythopoetic imagery and urban decay (what the movie’s Visual Futurist Syd Mead called “a whole leftover society”) to bracket the whole span of a life’s ascension and fall: the replicant Roy Batty (Rutger Hauer), who arrived on Earth with his comrades like refugees in a life-raft, washing up on the California coast.

Unlike most movies featuring artificial intelligences, the replicants don’t want to overthrow humanity or become more fully human: the two dominant modes of most A.I. movies. Blade Runner shows a third way, which doesn’t indulge either the apocalyptic escapism of robot overthrow (though A.I. risk is a genuine and underrated threat) or the sentimental dualism of Data, who flatters our belief that there are inherent human dignities beyond the reach of superintelligent, artificial agents.

Pris (Daryl Hannah), Zhora (Joanna Cassidy), Leon and Roy Batty aren’t after what we have, but after life itself, decoupling the beauty of lived experience from the narrow presumption of a human experiencer. The replicants are different from humans, but have emotional experiences we’d recognize, even if we find their expression repugnant.

In one of the most powerful scenes in the movie, Roy Batty reaches the inner sanctum of his creator, Dr. Eldon Tyrell (Joe Turkel), with the coerced help of Tyrell Corporation geneticist J.F. Sebastian (William Sanderson). Contrary to the calculating depiction of hyper-rational robots, Batty is soaked in sweat and uncertainty. He’s overwhelmed with fury and the simultaneous desire to win his father’s approval. When Batty kills Tyrell, it’s not with the placidity of a sociopath, like Ex Machina’s Ava, but with quaking, quivering, near-tears confusion. It’s a crime of passion.

The aftermath is similarly emotionally confused, a muddle of his genuine remorse for killing Sebastian and an awakening into his own place in the universe. Riding the elevator down from the Tyrell pyramid, Batty looks at the stars, newly certain that he will soon die, but overwhelmed with what he’s just done — an adolescent thrill at discovering himself and breaking free of what others had laid out for him. This emotional rapture will carry him through to his final encounter with Rick Deckard (Harrison Ford). Again, like a teenager in his own body's rapture, Batty will characterize his final moments with animal howling, stripping to his underwear, gloating and bashing his head through walls. It’s the replicants’ emotions, not their failed effort to find an answer to their mortality, that forms the real backbone of Blade Runner. Unlike most movies, science fiction in particular, the emotional throughline is the primary text of Blade Runner, actual plot mechanics sidelined to subtext.

Blade Runner goes beyond “what does it mean to be human?” and instead asks, “how do we place value on life?” The replicants kill a lot of people and evince little remorse. Sometimes they’re just plain creepy. Blade Runner purposely disarms its viewers of sympathy for the replicants, instead making a clear-eyed case for their dignity as sentient beings, regardless of their moral fortitude or proximity to humanness. This isn’t Johnny 5 or Pinocchio.

It’s with this understanding that we can attack one of the overwhelming modern Blade Runner fixations — is Rick Deckard a replicant? — as essentially Beside The Point. What’s interesting is not whether Deckard is a replicant (though the Director’s and Final Cut leave little room for any other possibility), but how does that change his life? Plumb both sides of that ambiguity and two very different Deckards are revealed. Most revealing: Deckard is more human if he’s a replicant! As a person, Deckard is a total turd. He’s a shitty person (particularly to Rachael), a drunk and a police state assassin who hates his job but does it anyway, either out of cowardice or masochism. As a replicant, he’s a tragic figure: treated like crap at work, but compelled forward on his dark trajectory anyway. His journey in Blade Runner becomes one of rebellion against his programming, as his experience with the replicants awaken genuine moral impulses within him.

As a replicant, Deckard is a tragic figure. As a human, he’s just a prick. I love that! The fixation on “whether or not” treats Blade Runner like some sort of puzzle to be cracked, rather than a living emotional experience. Blade Runner isn't a Christopher Nolan movie.

Blade Runner is too rich to easily encapsulate. There’s so much more that could be said. I love Leon’s delight at lining eyes up on Hannibal Chew’s shoulder and the childlike cruelty revealed in the replicants’ behavior. I love Tyrell’s one-word answer to the reasoning behind false memory implants: commerce. And Deckard’s Babylonian apartment on Floor 97, maybe the most alien space in the movie... love it. I love that earth sucks, but the recruitment blitz for jobs in space suggest the outer colonies are even worse, as if people must be lured. I love that Roy Batty gets the expected Jesus imagery, but it’s only the gruesome nails, not the pose — Christ reconfigured as a masochistic sensualist. And I love Batty’s famous final monologue. Blade Runner is an easy movie to love.