Blade Runner Version 7.0

Blade Runner was one of those flicks I just never saw. Tired of friends recoiling in horror at my confession that I hadn’t absorbed that one (similar to the reactions I got when telling geeks I’d never seen Heavy Metal) I picked up a copy of the seventeenth revision Ridley Scott did and re-re-re-re-released last winter. I have no idea what was different about this version from version 1.0, but my understanding is that this is the version Scott always wanted but budget and technology couldn’t give him originally. So, in theory, this edition stands the greatest chance of impressing me. The verdict:

Meh.

Plot was good, script was crappy. Decent noirish cinematography, though it kind of clashes with the sci-fi genre. Solid acting by Harrison Ford (duh). Rutger Hauer was tall and muscular and blonde. The replicant girlfriend chick was totally boring and had bad hair. And that’s all I got.

My major complaint is not the shallow characterization, or the pushy treatment of powerlessness in the face of mortality, or the fact that the pacing was so slow I had time to get up and bake brownies in between each line of dialogue. It’s flagrantly stupid depiction of future technology. This flick shows Los Angeles only eleven years from now with flying cars, genetic engineering, cyborgs, massive skyscraping pyramids, voice-responsive computers, space colonization and . . . no cell phones. It’s the superfuture and there’s no wireless communications? Even the cops have to yell at each other over loudspeakers from their hovering piggiemobiles. Lame.

This movie came out in 1982. There’s just no excuse for that, especially when you consider the following:

1965	1966	1973

Not to mention James Bond had a car phone and pager in 1963’s From Russia With Love. So it’s a little hard for me to buy it when Han Solo doesn’t even have a radio to call for backup after getting ninja kicked in the head by a Mary Lou Retton routine. Which brings me to my major beef: the robots.

I’ve never witnessed a group of robots so worthy of termination as the raggle-taggle band of desperate replicants. These morons are officially banned from my robot army. REJECTED 4-F. They must have used spare parts from the Apple III and then installed Windows ME in their tiny little cyborg brains. Oh hi! I’m a supersmart cyborg, but I return to the apartment of the guy I just murdered right after the deed so the cops can find me! Howdy! I can crush a human skull with one hand, but I’m going to use over elaborate but very sexy tumbling moves to kill my enemy, giving him a perfect shot at my exposed torso! Twits. If you’re a replicant who’s off the farm, there is a simple four step plan to happiness:

1) Find a bunch of money. (The plan has a lot of options at this step.)
2) Leave Earth, since you’ll be shot on sight there
3) Find a nice beach someplace
4) Stay there drinking margaritas until you die, which is soon, so get cracking

I never thought I’d ever see a robot flick and root for the humans. But this was kind of like watching UCLA play Stanford for me — the mathematical quandary is attempting to discern which one I’d like to see fail more. Like Terry Jones’ Brazil, this stinker is just a less sophisticated rip-off of much better earlier work by real artists. Like a high schooler writing an essay about Orwell, it’s clunky. Ridley Scott has a very good point to make in this flick — he just sucks at expressing himself well. The one part I can’t argue with is that even a robot would want to hook up with Harrison Ford.

I’m guessing Blade Runner remains popular because the effects at the time of release had to have been astounding, and Ford’s performance keeps this stinker afloat. Still, I’ve seen much better meditations on the meaning of the soul and coming to terms with mortality that didn’t involve dialogue so slow it could have been performed by a cast that had suffered from strokes. What a waste of a fantastic title. Here I was expecting a movie about samurai bootleggers, and instead I see something that should have been called “Boring Ways to Kill Robots from the Future.”

Meh.