Film is gorgeous, though. Every frame resonates beauty, the delicate play of light and shadow, depth, texture, colour, contrast. From the first moments you fall forwards into the celluloid dreamscape, drawn in by Vangelis' neon-lullaby of a score. Everything works to evoke the strangeness and sadness and madness of being alive, this sort of ur-emotion of what it is to be human and conscious in the world.
So many of the important moments are the interstitial ones - hovercar rides and snoozes in apartments and late night sighs on balconies staring out at the pulsing city below. The film sits in these moments, rests in them, allows them to develop and to breathe. Light is constantly glimmering, coruscating, being scattered and spread across the scene. Darkness pools, glowers, clutches to the sides of characters' faces. There is a preternatural beauty, larger than life, that provides the landscape from which similarly bold emotions may arise.
Look at Deckard's hero's journey, from the status quo of a cynical, world-weary detective archetype, into a realm of shifting forms, of compassion and searing sadness and love, manifested in Rachel and, in a different way, the killer replicant Roy Batty. Look at the electricity in Deckard and Rachel's relationship, how the capable and confident secretary so quickly becomes the vulnerable young girl, how she's flirting with Deckard probably before she realises, and he's drawn to her despite himself. The dynamic is problematic today, no question - him grabbing her to stop her from leaving, forcing her to kiss him - but within the context of this one narrative, not including the subconscious assumptions it puts onto relationships in the real world - for just these two characters, it makes sense. Deckard is pretty much taking advantage of a grieving and dying and lost young woman, but they are lost together, they have only each other, and ... I don't know, it's problematic, I can't say it's not. But it's big and powerful and emotionally charged.
Look at the violence, shocking, distressing, sometimes elegant, a dance of choreography and blaster fire across the screen. Zhora dying badly yet exquisitely through all those sheets of glass. Triss convulsing wildly against the wall like a thrashing spider beast.
And look at Roy Batty, growing from primitive hunter-wolf to empathetic human in the space of the film's final act. Breaking Deckard's fingers then telling him he'll give him a headstart, a carnivore enjoying the play of the chase. Hearing Deckard scream as he snaps his fingers back into place, Batty pausing for a moment, perhaps as the two men's shared existence occurs to him for the first time, blinking, and then letting forth a guttural moon-howl in reply. Finally on the rooftop darting an arm out with his dying lifeforce to rescue Deckard from falling, a primordial cry of "kinship" escaping his failing lips.
It's embarrassing and lame to spell out this stuff, of course, to say it in plodding linear words. They did it with the added voice-over in the theatrical cut, and it was horrendous. Which is why in this intended Final Cut the film reverts to saying it in flickering light, in billowing smoke, in framing and camera movement and in that transcendent score. Or, rather, it uses these things to weave its spell, to put you into the right mindstate, one in which these truisms are no longer thought of as hoary, but simply felt to be true.
This is the biggest departure from the novel, Do Androids Dream of Electric Sheep, which is far more complex and uncertain and thorny and difficult in the ideas it presents. Blade Runner, the film, puts forward simple, universal themes, in an emotive way, which is perhaps the biggest strength of cinema as a medium. It is like an opera, with more emphasis on the visual. A song of light and shadow. A cry across neo-noir rooftops, like Batty, howling out into the night. Emotions that are simple to state, yet far more resonant to be actually felt.
And that's about all I've got for now. Take care, loves yas, and I'll be back tomorrow. Bye bye bye x
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