Author: Pauline Kyle
Translator: Yi Ersan
Proofreader: Qin Tian
Source: The New Yorker (July 12, 1982)
The sci-fi thriller Blade Runner begins by declaring that the story takes place in the early 21st century, and that a so-called Blade Runner is actually a special police officer who is responsible for "retiring" (i.e., killing euphemisms) "artificial humans" — if these powerful humanoid creatures created by genetic engineers defy the ban and try to escape their hard labor in the space colonies and appear on Earth.
We're in Los Angeles in 2019, and Scott takes us to a hellish, claustrophobic city that has become a combination of Newark and old Singapore.
The sky was polluted, and there seemed to be a steady downpour. The air also revealed a hint of decay, so that the outside looked pitch black, but when we came indoors, it was the outdoor lights that were the brightest, and the huge searchlights swept through the city and shone in.
Blade Runner
A gigantic pyramid-shaped skyscraper (which seems to have been deliberately modeled after the Mayan and Egyptian civilizations) houses the offices of the Terry Company, which produces replicants with magical powers who are faster and more powerful than humans, and on the top floor of the Terry Company, the smoke-filled air is also filled with dust. (It's hard to wonder why these great inventors couldn't have created a tiny replicant to do the dust removal work.) ）
The set of the metropolis in the film is stunning and full of details; the future world is like a black market, made up of all kinds of chaotic and dirty things from the past - Chinatown, Arab-style castles, Times Square, huge and attractive Coca-Cola advertisements, neon lights in the style of Art Deco, and people's language is blurred and mixed. The $30 million Blade Runner is a fantastic sci-fi film with a clear and unique style that has a place in the history of cinema.
But we're always acutely aware of the functional existence of the set itself, in part because, despite the fascinating traces of decay, what we see doesn't make sense to us (just the 2019 version of the location).
Ridley Scott's scene scheduling isn't too good, and we never seem to know which part of the city we're in, or how it relates to the scenes before and after (Scott seems to be stuck in his own alley, losing his map). And we don't get caught up in the intriguing suspense, where the protagonist, Deckard (Harrison Ford), a former Blade Runner, is called back to hunt down four replicants who have blended into crowded street life. (The term "Blade Runner" actually comes from the title of a novel by William Burroughs and doesn't seem to be directly related to the film itself.) ）
Ridley Scott and his work associates concocted a very strange tenderloin: apart from, Hindu believers and some punks, there were almost no Caucasians (and not many blacks). The population here is almost exclusively minority — poor, mischievous Asians and mixed foreigners who may not seem depraved, but all seem inferior.
They're all selling stuff, doing business, struggling to get by; they never look up — they focus on what's in front of them, like gamblers obsessed with Vegas slot machines. Obviously, Deckard is a different person because he's the only guy you'll meet who can read the newspaper. The film doesn't explain much (except for the opening scene), but we get the vague impression that the richer, more decent people have left this world and gone to Scarsdale in space.
Forty years from today, we've come to a terrible electronic slum, and Blade Runner never asks, "How did all this happen?" The film sees this dirty, degraded future as a predetermined ending, leaving no room for questioning, presupposing that humanity has become a complete destroyer of the planet. Sci-fi movies of the past have tended to be utopian or cautionary; the film seems indifferent, indifferent, and perhaps, like some viewers, happy to see this medieval future—a slight sense of vengeful satisfaction.
However, a theme lurks on the edges of this comic strip: What does it mean to be human? In tracking down these supposedly emotionless replicants, Deckard discovers that they are not only suffering, but also desperate to survive, and that they are not lacking in generosity. They are more human than the scavengers who remain on Earth. Perhaps Scott and the two screenwriters, Hampton Vancher and David Pilps, detoured the subject because of its neo-fascist overtones.
But this hidden idea is the only thing in the film that seems to be a little interesting, and it has a strong visual basis: When an artificial person looks like a naturally born person — and even the naked eye can't tell them apart — how do you define the difference between the two?
Scott's creepy, oppressive imagery requires some sort of transcendent idea—aside from comical gimmicks, such as having Decker tell the film in the way of a lonely detective like in a Hamit or Chandler novel. The narration of the film, which is said to have been added later, sounds comical and destroys the visual effects of the picture. Dialogue is also not handled well. Scott doesn't seem to know how to use language in movies.
Blade Runner is a thriller without suspense; it seems to be a victim of its own innovative use of hardware, miniatures, and masks.
In a way, Scott and others must have thought that the whole narrative wasn't that important; perhaps it was Vangelis's roaring, obscene, and violent soundtrack that convinced them that audiences would be moved even if key parts of the story were missing. Vangelis injected so much film noir into the film that it occasionally overshadowed Scott's imagery.
Blade Runner doesn't directly introduce you into the story; it forces you to be passive. It carries a post-human feel that puts you in this twisted city labyrinth and makes you convinced that something bad is about to happen. Some scenes seem to have many subtexts hidden, but without any text and without context or context. This strange, prophetic atmosphere is reminiscent of the work of Nicholas Roig, but Roig is often interspersed with sexual expressions.
For Scott, it's just something unpleasant or ugly. The dizzying angles of the aircraft (we always seem to look down from dangerous heights) and the flying up and down the streets, rising and falling in a straight line between tall buildings, give us a provocative sense of vertigo. However, Scott doesn't stop there. He used a very unbalanced angle, to be precise, to produce a nausea that prepared us to deal with the feeling of nausea, as Deckard had seen.
And, perhaps because of the question of "what is a real human being", the film still keeps Decker and us hooked. (The protagonist's journey of discovery includes a visit to the eye designer who provided the human eye to Terry's genetic engineer, an old Chinese man with a thin body — as if eye-making were an ancient art.) Maybe Terry retrieved some of the used elbows in Saigon. Genetic engineering is a method of making replicant human slaves from living cell tissue that looks as casual as operating on car wreckage. ）
In Nicholas Roig's film, the characters are hollowed out and they become soft and neutral in a seductive way; while Scott squeezes his character, the fear he sets makes you expect some moment of release, while you know it's not the release you want.
The only thing we can think about is Decker, and the film seems to assume that his role is done when he signs Harrison Ford. Deckard's bachelor apartment, written by architect Frank Lloyd Wright, bears some symbols of Mayan culture.
Other than that, the only thing we've learned about him is that he's inexplicably mastered the jargon of a private investigator, he's also married, and he's tired of hunting down replicants – which has begun to make him sick. (There are dozens of family photos on the piano in his apartment, but they're all weird old-fashioned photos — which seem to date back to the 19th century — and we don't know what happened to those people.) ）
The film's visual range makes Deckard's triviality of traveling from one strange place to another in the process of tracking down four replicants (two men and two women) seem a bit stretched, but his contact with female replicants is quite sparkly. Joanna Cassidy plays Zula, a snake dancer who shows her charm and charm in "The Great Detective". (No one is more humanoid than Joanna Cassidy; the Zula she plays isn't made as an adult — but is shaped by her painful experiences, which are her on-screen image.) ）
And, in a truly shocking and surprising plot, Dalil Hannah, the acrobat Pris, performs a punk-style, Olympic-style gymnastic stunt.
Two male replicants caused trouble for the film. Leon (brion James gave the role a nerve-wracking caution and depth) landed a factory job at Terry, but his new employer suspected him of being a defecting replicant and gave him a very complex test, in short, to examine his emotional response by testing the constriction of his pupils as he handled questions about his early life. But the test of this replicant detector takes place at the beginning of the film, and we don't yet know that replicants don't have a supposedly early life at all.
This seemed pointless, as Terry must have kept records of their product images, in fact, when the police ordered Deckard to find and retire the four replicants, they gave clear photos of the people.
It might be better to save that test later in the film, such as when Deckard is suspicious of a beautiful dark-eyed woman, Terry's assistant Rachel (Sean Young). Rachel has a pair of eyes that appear in old potions commercials and looks more like a puppet than anyone else in the movie, as the director tries to imitate the pose Thatnberg posed for Dietrich, but she saves Decker's life and even plays the piano for him. (She also smokes, but the whole atmosphere gives the impression that no one doesn't smoke.) ）
Rachel wore a manly shoulder pad suit, as well as the smooth, stiff hairstyle and super-shiny lipstick of a professional woman in a forties movie; her shoulders appeared even before she entered the room. Still, her characters are poorly written; she's calm at first, but most of her time on screen is an inexplicable look of distress—tears and longing—and she never utters a single quip. I don't think she even had a chance to laugh.
The film's production team doesn't seem to have yet learned the wonderful and simple technique of bringing a character closer to the audience by having them tell jokes or making them overreact to a joke. If the people we are looking at are far removed from us, they may be nothing more than a shadow of someone who is not present.
The only character who can express multiple emotions is the fourth replicant, Roy Barty, played by the tall, blue-eyed, blonde-haired Dutch actor Rutger Hal, whose hair is lemon-white in the film. Hal seemed to be staring at people all the time; he still had an ominous smile hanging from the corners of his mouth, which could either whine like a mad owl or howl like a wolf, and sometimes he would think of himself as Pan, or as Jesus crucified.
He is in a state of utter rage, perhaps due to the fact that the replicant has a lifespan of only 4 years and appears quietly in the film like an evil Aryan superman; he brings a false tension to the character—an old, self-aware irony that is exaggerated with some Wagner style. His maniacal performance was an unconscious burlesque, but was clearly seen by the director as a great performance, especially when Hal became a noble victim and posed as a giant sculpture. (It's a miracle that he didn't rust in such a heavy rain.) ）
The scene is particularly amusing because poor Harrison Ford has a broken finger in one hand and can only grapple with his only able-bodied hand to grasp the cornice of a tall building—by then you may have forgotten that he was Harrison Ford, an actor who had captivated audiences with his infinite sense of humor, while the wide-eyed Hal was gushing and talking. Ford is like Harold Lloyd, who mistakenly appeared in the climactic part of Dueling in the Sun.
Ridley Scott may not have noticed that when Hal appeared on the screen, the camera seemed to stand still and time was interrupted because the whole film gives you the feeling that there is no progress. Decker's mission didn't seem to have any particular significance.
Who is he trying to save? Those rat people in the city sewers? They were behaved so inhumane that their lives and deaths seemed completely unimportant. Deckard, like Ridley Scott, had no sympathy for them. They are just part of the seemingly attractive fashion elements of the film, such as blue-gray and heavy metal. Lead airships can float in the smoky air, and perhaps the brains of the filmmakers as well.
Why did Deckard participate in this emergency hunt? These replicants are going to expire anyway. All the minds of the filmmakers must have been on the set. Apparently, these replicants had an incentive to return to Earth: they wanted to find Terry — and they wanted to extend their lives.
So if the police want to catch them, all they have to do is wait for them to show up at the Terry building. And our ace Blade Runner, why didn't it occur to you that if the Replicants couldn't prolong their lives, they might want to avenge their slave status, and everything he did was to protect Terry? You can imagine how the story was presented, that Deckard was a scapegoat for the dirty work of Terry; however, you can't figure out why Terry did a better job of protection, and why the film didn't string the plot together.
Blade Runner begins to get stale even when you look at it (you may also notice its relationship to Fritz Lang's Metropolis and von Sternberg's lighting techniques, as well as Polanski's Chinatown and Fellini's Roman Paintings).
There are also some remarkable images in the film — for example, when the camera is placed on the iron fence of the famous Bradbury Tower in Los Angeles, the iron appears to be distorted in shape. The images also include part shots of a lonely, morbid young toy maker Sebastian (William Sanderson) living in a deserted building.
Sebastian has created living toy partners for himself with the technology used to produce replicants, and since the debut of these toys is so appealing, we are waiting to see them in action again. And when the innocent, friendly Sebastian is in danger, we expect these toys to help him, or to feel uneasy, sad for him, or to avenge his plight later in the episode.
Subconsciously, we think that filmmakers don't go to great lengths to design a bunch of toy buddies just to forget about them. But the film misses the few expectations it has built, invisibly increasing the audience's self-abandonment — the film itself seems to be part of a decadent atmosphere, blade runner has nothing left for the viewer — and not even a second of grief for Sebastian. The film does not think about it from the perspective of human nature.
If someone proposes tests to detect humans, perhaps Ridley Scott and his partners should go into hiding. Like the ubiquitous smoke in the film, you feel as if everyone involved needs to clean themselves up.