Unlike the movies I’ve talked about in the past, I’ve seen Blade Runner before. Actually, I studied it pretty extensively for a college essay.
But a) it’s been a while and b) this time I enjoyed what I’d consider the ideal Blade Runner viewing experience, which is to say that I had it on in the backround while attending to other things.
- I’m actually not kidding. Someone described Blade Runner as the ultimate “vibe movie,” and I agree. The movie rewards careful viewing by showing its age. Roger Ebert described The Searchers as a film within a film: a stern, moving character study framed around a frivolous damsel-in-distress thing. I sort of feel the same way about Blade Runner. And just to be really clear what I mean, Deckard forcing himself on Rachel wigs me out. How you want to interpret that scene depends a lot how much credit you give the emotional complexity of the movie. And anyway, I won’t pretend to be the critic you need to hear about all this from. (Here’s a more thorough read on the topic, if you’re interested. And another.) This is all to say, Blade Runner doesn’t always align with modern sensibilities. Its aesthetic appeal, though, is flawless. Just glancing at the screen now and again, there’s hardly a shot that doesn’t evoke the feeling of the movie as a whole.
- One scene I did fully steep in: the “tears in rain” monologue, obviously. On the screen, it scans perfectly. But it’s also fractal, it rewards you the deeper you look into it. It has its own Wikipedia page, this monologue. Writer David Peoples — and I think this is true of Ridley Scott as well — had some trouble killing his darlings. The original monologue waxed Victorian. “I’ve been Offworld and back… frontiers!” “I’ve seen it, felt it…!” Rutger Hauer called it “opera talk.” So, he went rogue. His rewrite brought the film crew to tears.
- For this and for every other reason, Rutger Hauer is the best part of this movie. He does a sort of… gazelle run thing during the chase scene at the movie’s climax? Rules.
- Oh, except the dove thing is silly.
- Gaff is such a weirdo! Deckard does up his boots one lace at a time, he grumbles, he tries to get out of the rain. Gaff is like pop punk Willy Wonka. If you told me Jared Leto had only seen one movie, I’d guess Blade Runner, and I’d guess he only saw the parts where Gaff was on the screen. (“It’s too bad she won’t live. But then again who does?” To his credit, that’s actually a raw line.)