There's some great nuts and bolts filmmaking, simple elegance in the deployment of the film's grammar and punctuation, that I can't help but appreciate.
While the plot itself is hokey in ways - that opening where Bryant has Deckard "arrested" because he wouldn't have just come if asked; Deckard finding the snake scale and the photographs in Leon's apartment; doing that zoom and enhance on one of the photos to somehow pivot round into an area that shouldn't be visible; finding Zhora from the snake scale and talking his way into her changing room... it's hackneyed gumshoe stuff - but it's also only the frame upon which the more important emotional themes of the film may be entwined to blossom and to grow.
And while the plot beats aren't super exciting, the way Ridley Scott visualises them, the way he tells his story through the medium of film, is masterly.
Let's pick the transition between two scenes as an example. In the first scene Deckard, who has been tasked with chasing down a group of rogue replicants, is searching the apartment of Leon, the replicant who shot the detective first assigned to the case in the film's opening scene. In the next scene Roy Batty, the leader of the rogue replicants, is taking Leon to break into Eye World, a laboratory that manufactures synthetic eyes, on a quest to "meet his maker" and to demand a longer lifespan.
How Scott moves between these scenes, and the information he manages to impart, is a lesson in the fundamentals of mainstream narrative filmmaking.
So we're with Deckard in Leon's apartment as Deckard hunts for clues. The POV is firmly with Deckard, who has been established as the film's protagonist. The story unfolds through him.
But now we cut to an external shot of the street outside, the camera high, as if we're hovering at the apartment window, looking down. A subtle pan as we follow a figure on the street, who we recognise as Leon - the only of the replicants we've yet met, and the resident of this apartment - who stops and skulks in a doorway, staring up.
Do we assume Deckard has spotted Leon? We were with Deckard's POV, so strictly speaking that's what we'd think. But there's no reverse shot of Deckard by the window, no reaction, and next we see of Deckard he's still busy; he doesn't know he's being watched.
POV in film is sticky, the audience wants to emotionally attach to a character, and once attached we imprint, we're glued, and it takes some filmmaking skill to pry us off.
Scott does this delicately. Our perspective moves in physical space only a few steps from Deckard, to show us Leon in the long shot watching him. We realise we're being treated to information our protagonist does not have - the prey our hero is hunting is himself watching our hero from the shadows - and this creates suspense.
Then we're back to Deckard to finish his scene, as he finds the clue he's been looking for, a stack of photographs hidden in a drawer of clothes. Scott signifies this clue's importance with a change of soundtrack, the score becomes mysterious and enticing - and is in fact the Moroccan-inspired theme used for the Arabic district and the club in which Zhora dances later in the film. A thematic bond is created.
And now we're opening the next scene with an establishing shot of a different street - a different place, later, the shot a kind of palette cleanser to help separate us from Deckard's POV. We were momentarily distanced from Deckard with the insert of Leon, and now we're fully severed and brought to the POV of a new character.
... A clenched hand. A few lines of dramatic monologue. And we see the hand belongs to Roy Batty, who we've only seen before as a mug-shot in Deckard's briefing from his captain, but now he is living and positively radiating power and charisma in a phone booth on this street.
Batty comes out of the phone booth to greet Leon, who has walked up, we can infer from his previous place outside the apartment, spying on Deckard. The two have an exchange, and then walk together down the street, to the entrance to Eye World, to begin the scene.
Batty is the chief antagonist, the shadow self to Deckard's hero, the yin to his yang (or the yang to his yin?). But Scott doesn't simply cut from hero to villain. He uses Leon as a bridge. We're with Deckard, then hovering just away from him, noticing Leon, then we're with Batty as Leon shuffles up to report to him.
Notice we're not with Leon shuffling up to Batty. We're with Batty as Leon shuffles up. Leon, as the instrument of transition, is seen only in long shot from Deckard's POV (though Deckard himself doesn't notice), and then seen arriving from the POV of Batty. Leon is less important; it is Deckard and Batty who stand in prime importance facing one another.
Of course there is so much else that works to tell us this. The score, the performances, how Batty interrogates Leon, how Leon is deferential, Batty's terse, controlling tone ("Men? Policemen?"). But the simple building of shots, and who they favour, lays so much groundwork upon which the rest is built.
And all this is really only the transition into the Eye World scene, which is a scene filled with tension and malice, propelling the plot forwards, a scene you initially notice far more consciously than the passage moment that leads into it. And it's no coincidence that it comes right after the scene in the apartment. In the first the protagonist finds a vital clue (the photographs). In the second the antagonist finds a vital clue (the name J.F. Sebastian). There is an intended symmetry, and the two men are set up as equally important, their journeys running parallel, with the character of Leon used to transition from one to the other.
In contrast, the Eye World scene ends much more abruptly, with a close shot on Batty's glowing face as he intones to the technician freezing to death off-screen: "Now... where... would we find... this... J... F... Sebastian?" And we cut away.
The apartment and the Eye World scenes are linked together in meaning via their transition, and at the end of the second scene this storytelling moment has come to a close. We've been introduced to the antagonist, we've learnt of his goal, we are in no doubt as to his next step, and we're now free to return POV to Deckard, and continue his story, knowing that later on we'll see the replicants finding J.F. Sebastian, and all that that entails.
Like I said, it's not glamourous stuff. It's the bread and butter of filmmaking. But Scott does it so well, he shunts the audience exactly where he needs them to go, in a way that is a little different to the norm, and looks great, and has not one frame more than is necessary.
Blade Runner is a film about high-minded concepts - what it means to be conscious, etc etc, blah blah blah - but that stuff can only arise if the basic building blocks are firmly in place. Pulling POV from the protagonist and then back again is like the foundations upon which glittering spires of atmosphere and theme may rest - and these basics have, I think, an unvarnished, structural beauty of their own, one of girders and beams and supports, and I love getting right down into the guts of a film and shining a light on them.
The girders in Blade Runner are more beautiful than most.
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