Prepare to crank up the crankiness and prime the hate cannons. CraveOnline‘s Trolling is about to do what it does best: Piss all over the things you love. Using my critical acumen, I build up the universally hated, and rip apart the universally loved. I will not stop until all my credibility is gone. Like Jean-Luc Godard, I seek to kill all cinema. And this week’s exercise should be a breeze, as the target of my ire is Ridley Scott’s 1982 future-noir Blade Runner, a movie that is bafflingly held to be a sci-fi classic.
Blade Runner opened to very good reviews 31 years ago, and it has since been re-released on home video and in theaters several times, each time edited differently, and each time to an increasingly excited audience. It is often considered one of the more intelligent and thoughtful sci-fi films to come out of the genre, and stands as a tentpole in the minds of sci-fi fans as one of the best movies ever made. It was nominated for two Academy Awards, and has a coveted spot in the IMDb Top 250 (at last measure, it stands at #124).
All of this is baffling, because I make the following statement: Blade Runner sucks. It’s an over-long and confusing mess of a film that should not rightfully be praised as any sort of classic beyond its visual effects. Let’s pick this thing apart piece by piece, and see if we can find the meat.
Sometimes it can be fun to dissect an oblique film that seems to be leaving clues for you. I’m a big fan of David Lynch, and his mysterious labyrinths are endlessly fascinating to ponder. Blade Runner certainly fits the “oblique” bill, and it has thousands of fans constantly re-watching it, looking for new clues. But it’s one thing to dissect, and another thing to actually enjoy, feel, and understand. Blade Runner is barely enjoyable, low on feeling, and impossible to understand.
Until next week, let the hate mail flow.
Witney Seibold is a featured contributor on the CraveOnline Film Channel, co-host of The B-Movies Podcast. You can read his weekly articles Trolling, Free Film School and The Series Project, and follow him on “Twitter” at @WitneySeibold, where he is slowly losing his mind.
Blade Runner SUCKS
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It Makes No Sense
I have seen Blade Runner three times (in two different versions) and I still can't tell you what the exact story is. Director Ridley Scott was so keen on establishing mood and impressive sci-fi exteriors that he forgot to ensure he could tell a cogent story. I know the basic gist of it, of course: Deckard is an assassin of rogue robots who refuse to die on their expiration date, and a particularly mean rogue robot would rather kill than die. But through endless scenes of eyeball analysis and moody silent brooding, the details begin to mix together and vanish. I forgot M. Emmet Walsh, Brion James, and James Hong were even in this thing. If a film requires more than three viewings just to get straight, it's done something grievously wrong.
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Ridley Scott Can't Make Up His Damn Mind
The most common defense I hear of Blade Runner is “Well, you just didn't see the right version.” I respect the notion of a director's cut, and I suppose a director is free to re-edit their films as much as they please, but at some point, enough is enough. Ridley Scott has tinkered so much with his film over the years, that there are now four official versions of it. To get the gist of it all, you have to do is watch four versions of it, and compile the details in your head. Is this a Flaming Lips album or a movie? Or could it be that there is no one good version possible?
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Great Style, No Ideas
I do admire the way Blade Runner looks, and I think its Academy Award nominations for special effects and art direction are well-earned. The film also tantalizes us with philosophical ideas of thinking machines, and brings up the old sci-fi chestnut that a machine of sufficient complexity may be no different than a human. But Blade Runner only brings up some interesting questions to have them get lost in a miasma of ever-changing mirror images and unclear rainy fight scenes.
It comes to no conclusions, relying on vague allusion and baffling symbolism. It looks like it's going to ask some big questions, and then backs off, never revealing any complexity. After a while, you get the sense that Ridley Scott was more interested in his unicorns and smoky rainfall scenes than any actual notions or ideas.
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Seriously? A Unicorn?
Shut up. I don't want to hear your theories as to what the unicorn really means. I don't need to hear how it connects to the origami, or that Edward James Olmos somehow knew that Deckard was a replicant this whole time. I don't want to hear about how you think it was a spiritual connection to Ridley Scott's Legend. Looking at what's up there on the screen, as a bare-bones image, we're looking at a random shot of a unicorn in a sci-fi/noir film. It's a weird and awful image. That someone thought to include it displays a staggering lack of artistry and good judgment. Effing unicorn.
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Deckard is Bland
This may be a minor complaint in a film that is all about style, and banks on well-worn noir archetypes, but it's a complaint that is, you'll find, totally legit: Deckard is a pretty boring character. Most noir antiheroes are capable investigators, but live in a haze of cynicism. They crack off dialogue, don't take any guff, and seem immune to bullshit. Deckard, in terms of the cognitive space he fills, does seem to fulfill the requirements of a noir antihero, but seems to have been robbed of his energy or interest. He's not just cynical; he seems bored. He has no passion or emotion. When he falls in love with Sean Young, it's about as heated as a colander that's been in the fridge all day.
I know, I know. It's been posited that he may be a replicant himself, and the lack of emotions may be an oblique clue as to his true nature. You know what I say to that? He's still boring! That lack of emotional response only makes Deckard into a dullard.
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Who Cares if He's a Replicant?
Of all the lengthy lectures I've heard from Blade Runner fans, the most common is that Ridley Scott dropped in several obvious hints that the main character, assigned to kill replicants, may also himself be a replicant. Almost every detail in the film has (unconvincingly) been presented to me as evidence for (or even against) this point. I'd like to take a step back and ask this: What does is matter? Is the film more profound if he is or isn't a replicant? On paper, it might be. But in actual impact, the film is too dreamy and insubstantial to make us care at all. Deckard is boring, the movie is confusing, and, as a result, the “twist” ending is just rote screenwriting trickery for the sake of it.
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Seriously? A Unicorn?
I'm sorry, but I have to bring it up again. #&$%ing unicorn.
