:
Harrison Ford,
Rutger Hauer,
Sean Young,
more...
:
Ridley Scott,
Ridley Scott
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: 
: Warner Home Video
: Cult, Science Fiction , Robots & Cyborgs, Neo Noir
: 117 min.
: English
: English, Spanish, French
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This title is currently out of print.
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A blend of science fiction and noir detective fiction, Blade Runner (1982) was a box office and critical bust upon its initial exhibition, but its unique postmodern production design became hugely influential within the sci-fi genre, and the film gained a significant cult following that increased its stature. Harrison Ford stars as Rick Deckard, a retired cop in Los Angeles circa 2019. L.A. has become a pan-cultural dystopia of corporate advertising, pollution and flying automobiles, as well as replicants, human-like androids with short life spans built by the Tyrell Corporation for use in dangerous off-world colonization. Deckard's former job in the police department was as a talented blade runner, a euphemism for detectives that hunt down and assassinate rogue replicants. Called before his one-time superior (M. Emmett Walsh), Deckard is forced back into active duty. A quartet of replicants led by Roy Batty (Rutger Hauer) has escaped and headed to Earth, killing several humans in the process. After meeting with the eccentric Eldon Tyrell (Joe Turkel), creator of the replicants, Deckard finds and eliminates Zhora (Joanna Cassidy), one of his targets. Attacked by another replicant, Leon (Brion James), Deckard is about to be killed when he's saved by Rachael (Sean Young), Tyrell's assistant and a replicant who's unaware of her true nature. In the meantime, Batty and his replicant pleasure model lover, Pris (Darryl Hannah) use a dying inventor, J.F. Sebastian (William Sanderson) to get close to Tyrell and murder him. Deckard tracks the pair to Sebastian's, where a bloody and violent final confrontation between Deckard and Batty takes place on a skyscraper rooftop high above the city. In 1992, Ridley Scott released a popular director's cut that removed Deckard's narration, added a dream sequence, and excised a happy ending imposed by the results of test screenings; these legendary behind-the-scenes battles were chronicled in a 1996 tome, Future Noir: The Making of Blade Runner by Paul M. Sammon. ~ Karl Williams, All Movie Guide
Please click HERE to rent Ridley Scott's "Final Cut" version of the film.
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| Cyberpunk High Point
by jpceja
September 3, 2003 - 5:04 PM PDT
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6 out of 9 members found this review helpful
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These cyberpunk movies are so fleeting yet sexy, so bleak yet alluring, so discomforting yet liberating. It's no coincidence that the production design of Blade Runner, like other films of its dystopic genre, use constant rain and minimal light: that's the allure, the excitement of a passing storm, a hellish ghetto, an incomprehensible and malignant bureaucracy.
In exchange for their services as destabilizers of life, these forces demand a complete servitude, a slavery, to self-destruction; this in turn spurs the promise of rebellion, meaning either death at the hands of the system or new life within a sub-cluster of like-minded humans, who are trying to destroy that which they themselves created just by being humans (or humanlike robots). Thus films of the cyberpunk genre present the viewer an ultimate vision of corporate postmodernity, that is, deep, deep uncertainty at the hands of tech, since eventually the 'allure' of the ultra-state rears its head and a point of maximum confusion is reached. The rainy day gets tiresome.
Blade Runner, like most all cyberpunk films, is deeply individualistic instead of being humanistic: It admits a larger defeat at the hand of all-powerful institutions while allowing for the irony that these institutions do not have exclusive access to this 'all-power', which is subverted by rogues of the state for the purpose of establishing a 'counter-state' that requires only one individual to exist.
It's the ultimate sovereignty of the indiviudal. |
| philip k. dick and the wonders of rutger hauer
by psychodrama311
June 9, 2003 - 12:20 AM PDT
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8 out of 10 members found this review helpful
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| from the beginning to the end.. blade runner is a beautiful display of a great visual director. with a script adapted from the aforementioned philip k. dick's novel "do androids dream of electric sheep". and help from a great acting performance from harrison ford and rutger hauer. ridley scott spins a tale that in it's tyme was ahead of it. a great use of color. and a great way of filming.. a great movie all around.. |
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