Day 197: Blade Runner's nuts and bolts

More stuff about Blade Runner that wouldn't fit into the post last night...

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.

Day 196: Blade Runner

It's been a good day off. I've been watching Blade Runner, for like four hours now, pausing the film every time something occurs to me that I have to write down, which happens about sixty times a scene. It's slow going.

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

Day 173: Tears in the snow #2

More fevered late night words about Blade Runner 2049! More! More!

 OK, jeez. All right.

So we know I think this is a film that shouldn’t have been made. But within that there is much in the themes, the tone, the cinematography, in many of the performances, to love.

But there’s an awful lot that’s a frustrating mess, as well.

The plot is not good. It’s paint-by-numbers, derivative, it barely rises above the cliches of the genre. And its engine is so often powered by plot necessity, by cool ideas, by moments, than by character. The characters end up doing implausible things because the plot dictates, rather than the plot being dictated by an exploration of character.

Look at the scene right after Ryan Gosling’s Officer K has discovered, so he believes, that he’s the chosen one, the child born of a replicant, that he is truly alive, and thus has, as he says, “a soul”. The next scene is him returning home - where his holographic girlfriend, Joi, has ordered him a prostitute who she will lay her visual presence on top of so it will feel to K like he’s having sex with Joi, not the sex worker. What the hell is this scene doing here? It doesn’t fit tonally, at all - it’s a heated moment of event and consequence, when we should be given stillness and space to process, along with K, the revelation about his apparent newfound existence, and the ramifications that that will entail.

But the scene is needed from a plotting point of view, so that the sex worker can plant a bug in K’s jacket, so she can follow him later - and maybe because it’s a scene that someone somewhere thought was cool, like a discarded Black Mirror concept - and so there it sits. It tanks the pacing - it’s like a musical composition that right after all the themes mingle and rise and crash, that instead of cutting to silence and then building up slowly, it comes straight in with something unrelated. It utterly ruins the rhythm, the flow - and ultimately the emotional heart of the piece.

This is a film of events - this happens and then this happens, and then that leads to this - rather than of emotions. Apart from the excellent beginning and end it never really rests within its scenes, never sits in them and lets them breathe, lets them develop organically, lugubriously - it’s a film that doesn’t give you space to exist within its world.

It’s too busy trying to tell a story, and it’s a prosaic, pedestrian story at that. There are sins of convenience and coincidence everywhere, subplots that go nowhere, uninteresting side characters, an antagonist in industrialist Niander Wallace who, for all the shots of him submersed in shadow, declaiming biblical-sounding lines (like him from the first film, innit!), is just another dull bad guy, ever monologuing, with ill-defined motivations (he wants the secret of the replicant baby so he can produce replicants faster than he can assemble them, because his slave-labour workforce has taken him to nine worlds, but “a child can count to nine on its fingers” … and so… I guess that is not enough?).

I mean, it all just about works. The film holds itself together. But there’s this feeling of the scriptwriters assembling a wobbling tower, with elements only existing in order to hold up something above, whole floors that are required to be there by the overall structure, but that serve no purpose by themselves. It feels mechanical, something assembled, rather than something grown. The first film, of course, also had moments like this - but it was so clear that the plot was only the bones upon which to hang the meat of the work, the art of it, that it barely mattered. Yes, the plot shunted itself forward with Deckard doing some “zoom and enhance” on a photograph he stumbled across, or finding a barcode on an artificial snake scale that could only come from one location - but when that was just an excuse for some moody noirish staring out of windows as elegiac blues played, who gave a shit?

And then we have Deckard.

Deckard is Blade Runner 2049’s elephant in the crumbling neon cityscape. Someone decided Deckard, the protagonist of the first film, was going to return. Harrison “Pay Me Enough” Ford signed on, and the filmmakers became lumped with an utterly iconic character to whom they were never going to do justice - because how could you? - who wasn’t going to be the protagonist in this film (Harrison “Act for a Buck” Ford only wanted a new loft extension, he wasn’t committing to more than a few scenes), but nevertheless was by his very existence going to pull the emotional weight of the film towards himself when he turned up. Deckard has the gravitational pull of a planet, as does Ford, and it’s hard to know what to do with a story in which all does not revolve around them. As with Star Wars VII, the scriptwriters come up with a workaround, and it suffices, but it’s intrinsically flawed.

There he is, old Deckard, stepping from the shadows, blaster raised (like in the first film, natch), saying things the filmmakers hope are iconic, but which are not iconic. And there’s Ford playing him, making his face do a bit of acting, deploying his expert’s chops, while back behind the eyes there he’s dreaming about that new conservatory he’ll be using the paycheck to build for himself.

And he puts that special-edition futuristic bottle of Johnny Walker - available for sale to coincide with the film’s release - down on the counter with a twist, so the label faces outwards towards us, and sucks that corporate cock, and takes his whore-money all the way to the bank. That damn talented, couldn’t-give-a-shit shill!

I don’t blame him at all. But it’d be a better film without him.

And then, finally, I want to talk about Blade Runner 2049’s trouble with women. Joi, Officer K’s artificial girlfriend, is a doe-eyed, objectified, sexualised, subservient image of feminine perfection, the cute supermodel with the long lashes and foreign accent, doting on the male protagonist and providing for his every need. Now, this is the point of the character, and it’s a rug pulled out from under K - she’s like this because she’s been programmed like this, to keep K mollified; she only tells him he must be the chosen one and that he’s special because her routines make her tell her owner “everything they wish to hear”.

That’s a fine plot point, a good idea, but you can’t get past the fact that the film also gets to shoot the actress singularly with the male gaze, showing her in cute outfits, wearing dresses with no bra in the rain, staring up at K, and by extension us, with fluttering orgasmic eyes, perfect and deferential - at one point slinking naked on all fours, cat-like, porn-like, projected as an advert a hundred feet tall across the rooftops. Yes, this scene is mocking K for his foolishness at believing Joi belonged only to him - showing that she will put out for whoever pays for her package - but this is not exactly female empowerment. Her existence is nothing beyond satisfying him, the revelation being that she in fact satisfies anyone - and for K this is a cold and lonely discovery, but for Joi… well, who cares? She’s not important.

The film takes power from K, but still gives the audience their male power fantasy - and neatly has its cake and eats it too.

There are other moments that leave a sour taste. The salacious stuff with the sex worker, a screenwriter’s wet dream, adding no real meaning to the narrative. The extreme violence perpetrated on the female replicant by Wallace in his introductory scene, traumatic, repugnant, upsetting - and unearned, I think, by the film. It’s shorthand to show how dastardly the villain is, but it’s like it’s deployed in this throwaway manner, shocking as an image but never explored, its consequences unfelt, unburdening itself of responsibility when the responsibility was there.

So that’s all I got tonight. I’m running on fumes now, I don’t think much of this makes any sense, but it’s all good. Got my thoughts down, had fun, found more in the film than I would have done without writing.

Blade Runner, as the Director’s Cut, was a weird and unfathomable poetic dreamworld, sensuous and elegant and esoteric - and Blade Runner 2049 has filmmaking motivations similar to that in some ways, but it is also much more a piece of entertainment, a product, with elements that run counter to the purity of the artistic vision. I wish there was more time spent hanging out with K, exploring how it feels to be a replicant who retires other replicants - getting lost in the mists of this world, going on a journey with the characters, rather than seeing what happens to them. But still, in the face of everything egregious the film could have been, had every right to be, it ends up often affecting, powerful, playing on some of the magic of the original, some from the source novel, and just a little that is all its own.

Day 172: Tears in the snow #1

I've been watching Blade Runner 2049. Actually I watched it yesterday, but then Fran came round and I had no time to sit and compose my thoughts, so I had to write about wild mind monkeys instead. I had fifty different things to do today, but found an hour to sit in a coffee shop and make notes. Now I've got a little time to try to form the thoughts into a blog post. Who knows how coherent or flowing it'll be, but I'll do what I can... [Spoilers ahead, I would imagine]

So Blade Runner 2049 is a film that was not crying out to be made. Fans wanted it, certain executives no doubt wanted it, but artistically there was nothing about the first one that required further exploration. It was perfect and final, open, ambiguous, and anything added to it would necessary detract from the purity of the expression. The theatrical release, in fact, famously mashed the film, with an egregious voice-over narration added to explain the moments better left unspoken, and a tacked-on happy ending that didn't fit with the tone.

The director's cut (and later "final cut") removed all that, and pared the film back to its bolder, more mysterious vision. And there the story should lie.

But now here's a sequel, that through its very existence must take that gorgeous possibility soup of the original's ending, in which opposites exist together, and questions remain thankfully unanswered - is Deckard a replicant? What happens to Rachel? Does Gaff let them live? - a sequel must take this soup and boil it down into one single outcome, create a new canon, and remove all ambiguity. It's like taking a piece of art that you love and saying "I don't care about your interpretation, actually we're telling you that it means /this/." And what they say is just the work of some hip young screenwriters, and is never better than the unlimited potential that froths and swirls in your head.

It happened with Star Wars, both the prequels and sequels, and it's what happens here. Of course, they attempt to retain some ambiguity - the Deckard-replicant question, the most tiresome and uninteresting part of the whole thing, gets nodded and winked and nudged and coughed at, and never properly answered. Which, like, who gives a shit? But other stuff is tied down. Rachel, it is revealed, was programmed with an extended lifespan (like in that cheesy theatrical V.O., which for me ruins the whole fucking point - that we don't have much, but we have this; "it's too bad she won't live, but then again, who does?"), and her and Deckard escaped, and she became implausibly pregnant with Deckard's baby, because she was a super special replicant, and Deckard sent them away and went into hiding so none of them were discovered, but then Rachel died in childbirth, and the baby... well the baby drives the plot of the sequel.

The filmmakers work so hard to get this all to hold together, and to use it to carve out space to tell their own story. In many ways they're successful, but, Christ, can you feel the plot straining on its guy ropes, and you never overcome the sense that everyone involved is making the best of something that inherently shouldn't exist.

But, hey, saying all that, you can still watch the original and then turn it off and leave it there. And you can still watch this and see it as its own beast, and keep it separate from that thing you love. And there is much here to admire.

The opening is excellent. Gone, yes, is the sumptuous fiery nightscape that begins the original, but in its place - after the obligatory callback of the close-up of the eye - is a soaring journey over the grey desolate gloom of protein farms and industrial installations stretching into the mists - swallowed by the mists - the structures of a humanity not forging new life from the flames but clinging to the edge of a dying rock in the emptiness of space.

It's bleak, it's low-key, and I love it.

Down from the establishing landscape shots our first intimate moment is of a rubber-gloved hand scooping maggots out of a murky pool. This is life, the film posits: maggots crawling in the murk. Whether human, insect, replicant, or computer AI, life for all of us is the same: cold and lonely and meaningless, yet we cling to it still with everything we possess. We crawl, we know not why, even as our planet fades beneath us, and if pressed we will kill others to keep ourselves alive. Killing in the world of Blade Runner is not savoured, it is repugnant and sad, yet everything does it, when there is no choice.

So it is with Officer K, the replicant protagonist played by Ryan Gosling. He is a Blade Runner, a bounty hunter tasked with tracking down and "retiring" the older models of replicant who were not as obedient as he himself is. He retires them by shooting them with his gun.

Officer K has found an older model in the film's opening - the owner of the gloved hand, a replicant that has been hiding out for twenty years as a protein farmer, played with physicality yet a gentle weariness by Dave Bautista - and Officer K is here to do his job.

He does it. He does not enjoy it. But if it wasn't him it would be someone else, and he would just be killed for not following orders. Such is life.

It's a good scene, with themes from the Philip K. Dick source novel, Do Androids Dream of Electric Sheep, that were less explored in the first Blade Runner film, and it works well through Denis Villeneuve's direction. The cinematography is exquisite, the colour work is affecting, the framing is great, there's superb chiaroscuro, a good rhythm, good sound design, excellent performances, it all works a treat.

Any time the film is exploring this theme, of existence as something filled with pain to which we nevertheless cling, it is strong. There's another related theme about K wanting to be special, to be unique, to be the chosen one, the hero, and then finding it all was a lie and he's no one, he's not the baby that was born, but a replicant made in a lab - and this theme is great as well. We all believe ourselves to be special - we have been the centre of everything we've experienced, after all; the world literally revolves around us - but in truth we're flecks of dust, meaningless maggots - we crawl to stay alive, because that's all we know, and then we die.

Yet beneath the shifting forms of life and death, beneath the almost incessant pain, is there not something shared that binds us together, something deeper to which we are drawn. "Kinship" the murderous Roy Batty cries at the conclusion to the first film, as in his dying moments he reaches out and saves the falling Deckard's life. The story of Blade Runner 2049 ends with Officer K sacrificing himself for another, bleeding out in the snow, alone and unnoticed, yet having for a brief time truly lived.

I am reminded of that classic haiku by the Buddhist poet Issa:

This dewdrop world -
May be a dewdrop world,
And yet, and yet...

And now I must leave that there, because I'm in for the delivery at 7am tomorrow, and once again it is past midnight. But I think I'll jot down some more thoughts if I have time tomorrow (though I'm busy until late evening), about the engine of plot, Harrison "Will Act for a Paycheck" Ford, and the film's problem with women.

Until then x