Overall Rating
  Awesome: 66.54%
Worth A Look: 11.42%
Average: 10.24%
Pretty Bad: 6.69%
Total Crap: 5.12%
8 reviews, 206 user ratings
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| Blade Runner |
by dionwr
"Intricate! Visual! Striking! Also Dull! Boring! Shallow!"
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Despite the well-deserved reputation this movie has for its superb visuals, when that is set aside, there is nothing here. The characters are inconsistent, unconvincing, and uncompelling.I've written before that the best criticism is usually another work that does whatever it was trying to do, and does it right. For Bladerunner, the work that shows its faults is the book it was based on, Philip K. Dick's Do Androids Dream of Electric Sheep?
The point of the book, and ostensibly the movie, was Dick's conception of what defines human. What makes a human is a sentient being, he'd have said, capable of empathy. To show this, he wrote of a man whose job was to capture renegade androids and destroy them. This is rendered very difficult because the androids pass for human, look completely human, have all our intelligence, and lack only our empathy. To make it even more complicated, his protaganist is finding his own empathy dwindling due to his soul-destroying job.
In the movie, we get a comic-book level version of that plot. But, in the first of many mistakes, the androids (called "replicants" in the film}, are no longer incapable of empathy, they're just designed with short lives, such that their emotions never get a chance to develop. This might have worked as a plot element, but it drastically undercuts the point, which the movie is making murky enough to begin with.
Ridley Scott is great with texture and atmosphere, but he doesn't do too well with plot. That's never clearer than with this film, in which our hero meanders from place to place, and no urgency of any kind is ever developed. Was there ever a police-detective-thriller that moved so languidly?
A slow pace isn't necessarily a problem (take a look at Tokyo Story, 2001: A Space Odyssey, or Days of Heaven), but Scott doesn't use the time to fill in any explanations that might make the character's actions make sense. What the slow pace gives us time for is LOTS of shots of the production design, the photography, and the special effects, all of which are wondrous. But if you're interested in character or theme, the film's a Rorshach. Into which, I must admit, a great many people read a depth that simply isn't there.
Personally, it bored the bejeezus out of me. I have seen it many times over the years, as friends have gotten me to view it again and again so that I'd "get" it. Well, I see what they're pointing out--but I don't accept it.
The film is thin of character development because it doesn't care about character. It cares about its opulent, rainy L.A. of the future, with its stunning wealth side-by-side with dire poverty. It cares about its accoutrements and set design and photography. It cares about getting the lighting perfect on Sean Young for her retro-40's hairstyle and dress in the Tyrrell pyramid.I give it three stars, because there's no way to split it up and give it five stars for its images, but only one star for its meaning.
link directly to this review at https://www.efilmcritic.com/review.php?movie=924&reviewer=301
originally posted: 08/13/02 07:45:40
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OFFICIAL SELECTION: 2016 Boston SciFi Film Festival For more in the 2016 Boston Sci-Fi Film Festival series, click here.
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USA
25-Jun-1982 (R)
DVD: 07-Nov-2000
UK
09-Sep-1982 (15)
Australia
16-Sep-1982 (M)
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