Director: Ridley Scott
Cast: Harrison Ford, Rutger Hauer, Sean Young, Edward James Olmos
Have I Seen it Before: Yeah…
Did I Like It: …I was really hoping you weren’t going to ask me that.
Ridley Scott’s Blade Runner is just one of those movies… People love it, and they’re not wrong. To have the special effects for any movie still work past six months the initial release of the film in question is something of a small miracle*. The cast is pretty great, and this is prime pre-sleepwalking Harrison Ford. I can see the fusion between postmodern sci-fi and film noir is very particularly designed.
And yet, it’s never all come together in my eyes. It might be that it’s too slow for me—or for that matter, modern audiences—but I’ve enjoyed slower films before. It could also be that the film may still come from that heralded era where films were truly meant to be enjoyed on the big screen, and the home video market was a faded afterthought. Ultimately, though, I think that—even though the special effects are obviously well-crafted—the film’s aesthetic can’t quite reach for any degree of timelessness, and every frame and every sound within the movie screams “THIS MOVIE WAS MADE IN THE 1980s.” Even Ridley Scott’s other great science fiction film of the era—Alien (1979)— can more often than not avoid any sort of fashionable quality and maybe look for a few seconds as if it might have been made any year.
Maybe things will change on this new screening of the film…
And—upon further review—I’m just not that into it, and beyond the reasons I noted above, I’m having a hard time quantifying my apathy. Maybe it’s the music? Maybe it’s the pacing. Maybe all of those elements fuse together and introduce in me some pervasive feeling of unease. I don’t necessarily dislike a movie that wants me to feel ill-at-ease, but I would like to be able to point to something particular that’s making me feel that way. This film just doesn’t do it.
*What’s more, I just can’t buy George Lucas’ argument that he couldn’t have made the prequels until CGI technology reached the “Jurassic Park” phase. All of his Coruscant scenes have been pretty much worked out on Scott’s canvas.