BLADE RUNNER: The Final Cut Reviewed for CompuServe by Harvey S. Karten
Warner Bros
Grade: B+
Directed by: Ridley Scott
Written By: Hampton Fancher, David Peoples, from Philip K. Dick's "Do Androids Dream of Electric
Sheep"
Cast: Harrison Ford, Rutger Hauser, Sean Young, Edward James Olmos, M. Emmet Walsh, Daryl
Hannah, William Sanderson, Brion James
Screened at: AMC Empire, NYC, 11/2/07
Opens: October 5, 2007 (original opened 1982) Too bad “Blade Runner” could not be shown in the New World in 1620 instead of in 1982. If the early settlers could have seen the dangers of slavery as imagined in this cinematic treatment of Philip K. Dick’s story, the “peculiar institution” as it came to be called by its opponents would never have taken root, and the U.S. could have been the example to the world that it still sets itself up to be. “Blade Runner” is the name given to the hunter, Deckard (Harrison Ford), whose job it is to track down and kill robotic replicants created by the Tyrell Corporation which rebel against their enslaved condition. The story, adapted for the screen by Hampton Fancher and David Peoples and directed by Ridley Scott, and which hit the theaters in 1982, takes place in a futuristic Los Angeles in 2019, a bleak landscape almost devoid of people. Anyone who could get out, did, leaving only the Unwashed, who are policed by patrol cars traveling vertically as well as horizontally. If “Blade Runner” were a brand-new sci-fi movie opening now, in 2007, it would be a marvel of technology, but as a feature in 1982, it’s a classic, a masterstroke of special effects wizardly and ingenious production design. For reasons known only to Ridley Scott, who went on to direct blockbusters such as “Gladiator,” “Hannibal,” “Black Hawk Down,” and “American Gangster,” the narrative borders on incoherent, with characters disappearing and returning at odd times, the plot lurching forward, characters hardly developed. Aside from lavish effects and design however, the film is graced by a smashing turn by Rutger Hauer as a villainous rebel, appropriately named Batty, who upstages the heroic but colorless Harrison Ford–the latter appearing at a youthful age of forty, just a year after his presence as Indiana Jones in “Raiders of the Lost Ark.” The opening shot of Los Angeles all lit up like New York’s Times Square and Tokyo’s Ginza can make anyone over the age of thirty want to live in Montana. In the first interior scene, an interview between an officer of the Tyrell Corporation and a replicant, Leon (Brion James), ends badly for the former. Bryant (M. Emmet Walsh), a police inspector, presses retired blade runner Deckard (Harrison Ford) back into service to hunt Leon and a few other rebels down and kill them. To gain further information, Deckard interviews the CEO, Tyrell (Joe Turkel), who tests Deckard’s ability to detect replicants by asking him whether the chief’s beautiful personal assistant, Rachael (Sean Young) is human or replicant. When Deckard develops the hots for the woman, he begins to wonder whether she has the ability to care for him in like manner, a task that presents a romantic text for the film. A similar romance has developed between the diabolical Batty and Pris (Daryl Hannah), the two frustrated at their mortality as each replicant is programmed to live a limited number of years and are determined to seek a few more decades at the very least, immortality as the ideal. Happily there are no beasts crawling out of people’s stomachs as in director Scott’s “Alien,” no vampires or werewolves. The only non-human beings are replicants who are so much like us that they challenge the blade runner to detect them as others. There seems to be no reason to shoot them, since they are not out to kill people, but no matter: the aim of the movie is not to present a coherent story but to wow us with effects and design. In that regard, “Blade Runner” succeeds. Rated R. 124 minutes © 2007 by Harvey Karten Member: NY Film Critics Online | 
