1982@40: BLADE RUNNER (spoilers)

"Lemme tell you about my mother." Kowalski murmurs that before he blasts Agent Holden into the next room. That's at the end of a tense interrogation meant to test Kowalski's humanity. He knows he's flunking and the mother question shoves him in a corner. Across town retired Blade Runner Deckard gets hauled away from his dumplings and noodles for a re-hiring chat with his old boss at headquarters. A small group of lethal replicants have illegally re-entered the atmosphere and need dispatching. Deckard finds himself at the source point of androids, meeting the great Mr Tyrell himself and does the Voigt Komp routine with Tyrell's niece. She's a clanker. As these threads approach each other, winding and weaving, Deckard won't just be hunting down bad robots, he'll be wondering about his own nature, if that's what it's called.

Ridley Scott's classic neo-noir sci-fi set the pallet and the design for the genre to come for over a decade, building a splashy neon city whose vintage grandeur is loosening brick by brick from the endless rain of climate change and whose people seem to swarm like insects. He could have died with that achievement but then he'd already made Lucas' dirty space grittier with workaday talk and penalty rates in Alien. Blade Runner is a marvel of world building.

Well, the screen life is set at a near future far short of the setting (2019), where an imagined interface of mumbled commands gets results that a few mouse clicks or wheels still get faster. It's not that bad a job, though, considering how they scaled the devices down and integrated them into the domestic decor when the computers that aided the production still filled rooms. Also, if you think of how advanced the computers in the original Star Trek look by comparison with the ones from the '60s you're seeing a wilful leap from the old tape spool, valves and incandescent lights. They even got the floppy disc kind of right. In 1982, Ridley Scott was reeling all that back into the kind of machines we'd have to use, unglamourous, daily, functional. It's a similar feat of the imagination it just looks a little more like the office than we feel comfortable with. 

It's the city at large that impresses, here. It spreads beyond the screen, as weathered as an old cliff face, with the teeming futility that any alpha replicant would wince at as soon as see. There are no attack ships on fire here, just cops and little people. But their purpose is not to move into a flat, they want to leap out of the four year constraint given them by factory workers as dull as anyone around them. Even the designer at the centre suffers from a formless ennui. Even here, at the centre of their genesis where a kindly and prematurely aged loner wastes his genius on physically making his own friends. There is a lot more depth to the meeting that Pris stages between herself and J.F. Sebastian; her own programming recognises vulnerabilities within him to manipulate his pain. She even seems to know that his recognition of this will not create resistance. Darryl Hannah glows as the standard pleasure model grown well more self aware and nuanced than her designers allowed for. We know she's a replicant but her ingenue facade is so charming we prefer to believe it.

Rutger Hauer's Roy Batty feels more like the cinema that was presenting Conan the Barbarian until the sadism that his own self-development has made comes out. He's as much a pragmatic torturer as Wagnerian hero which only makes him scarier. His lengthy showdown with Deckard takes the deluxe sci-fi tale here into the epic, to a point where Deckard cannot help but be haunted forever by it. Hauer famously suggested the last line of his dying monologue. It resonates with all of us. The closing line from the detective takes further down: "Too bad she won't live but then again who does?"

This is where my experiences bifurcate. In 1982, Blade Runner was a cuter film with a hard boiled narration and a nice ending with a glider and big open scenery. Since then the film has undergone a number of different cuts, all purporting to be definitive. For this article I watched the currently available Final Cut version on 4K. The practice of directors returning to their canonical works and bloating them out with cutting room goodness that would have better life as home video extras has been one of the trials of the technology and the market. In the main they end up like the longer cuts of Amadeus (purpose defeating), Apocalypse Now (boring) The Exorcist (failed grab at later currency). In the case of Blade Runner I prefer this one. Nothing drags, nothing cloys, it's just a deathless epic.

I've gone all this way with almost no mention of Harrison Ford at the centre of the narrative. Is there much to say? He is poised between finding such depth as he was able in the Star Wars cycle and then reducing himself to an action figure as Indy Jones and he was soon to take pride of place in the cinematic trophy room as a steroidal dad for us all. Here, at least, he was given a shot at a character penned by a visionary whose cinema had to be conjured by a reader. It is to Ford's, Scott's and the movie's once and future pride that Phillip K. Dick saw Ford as Deckard and recognised him:

"He has been more Deckard than I had imagined. It has been incredible. Deckard exists!"