I don't know such stuff
Back in the early 90s, I was a frustrated Batman fan. Or maybe it’s more correct to say I was a Batman fan in waiting. Thanks to Tim Burton’s comic book movie phenomenon being rated as of the first 12s, I couldn’t see it on the big screen. I had to begrudgingly make do with the tie ins and merchandising. All of it telling me one thing and one thing only: you need to see this movie.
When Batman finally came out to rent on VHS, I decided it would be the centrepiece for my impending birthday party. My school friends would come round, we’d have cake and then we’d all watch Batman together. It was a fine plan, with only one drawback: not everyone’s parents agreed. Some felt a 12 might be too much for their offspring. After much negotiating, it was decided we’d watch something else and my dad suggested we opt for Blade Runner instead.
To this day, I still can’t quite follow the logic of the parents who were worried about their kids watching a 12, were fine with a 15. Whilst Burton’s Bat played in pantomime and cartoon shadows, Blade Runner is a rain soaked mystery play. A philosophical noir, smudged with synthetic blood, tear stained make up and the pollution of a dying world. Even in its original, heavily narrated and happier ending form, the movie asks some big questions. The villains here aren’t nearly so black and white (or red and green) as anything Bruce Wayne might face and the hero himself isn’t quite so heroic. He’s a state sanctioned vigilante, in a sense. A tired hunter, numbed by the drink and the countless deaths we never get to see.
Of course, back then November 2019 seemed an impossibly long way away. Never mind your galaxies far, far away. Blade Runner felt even more unreachable, if only because we’d been told at the start just how close to our lives it might be. The flying cars. The replicants. The seething streets and the nightmare skyline. Flames erupting into the darkness from skyscraper high chimneys. Towering advertisements for soft drinks and escape blaring into the night at all hours. The rain and the traffic never stopping.
As I grew up, Blade Runner grew with me. What I first saw as a mysteriously tragic action movie, became something else as I watched it again and again. I began to understand what Ridley Scott was trying to tell me. There was a far larger story hiding beneath the puddles and wind blown litter.
Then came the new cuts. The director’s cut, with added unicorn and longer silences. A change my dad has never been happy with. Much like Guillermo Del Toro, he’s a fan of the narration. He feels it adds to the Chandler-esque setting of Rick Deckard’s life. If I’m being honest, I never had a problem with it either. It’s how I first experienced that movie and, in my early teens, it didn’t feel as clunky as it clearly did for a lot of viewers. These days, I still find there are a lot of moments in the movie that feel too long without Deckard’s weary words. There are shots that could be cut down now they don’t need to allow images for Ford to muse over them. You can still feel the ghost whisper of them as you watch him constantly try to make peace with his job and make sense of his place in a world that he wants no part of anymore.
As I got into my 20s, there were rumours of other cuts of the movie. There was the day I found Philip K Dick;s original novel and saw the true paranoid angst and isolation that Dick intended this story to deliver. I read books on the making on the movie. Mildly authorised and not wholly successful sequel novels. There was that fairly average Kurt Russell movie Soldier, that didn’t offer much in the way of entertainment but used borrowed place names and references from Blade Runner that made you wonder if you were watching a polite nod from a fan or if it was actually someone telling a story in the same world.
A few years ago, we received Ridley Scott’s latest, and supposedly definitive, version. The aptly named Final Cut. With the scars from his director’s cut healed over now and a little CGI peppered into the restoration to add to the world he’d spent so long honing for us, Deckard’s story felt honed close to perfection.
These days, there’s a box set which offers us five cuts in total. Not only that, but we have the official sequel these days as well. The visually arresting and incredibly respectful Blade Runner 2049. In my opinion it’s one of the great high wire acts in the world of the modern sequel. The action is still brutal and not there to give you a rollercoaster squeal. People’s bones break with a wet snap. Bullets leave scorch marks on the skin and no answer comes clear enough to let you know exactly what you’re watching.
But, for all of this, I had my most interesting and personal experience of Blade Runner yesterday afternoon. In 2019, no less. Scott’s final cut has been granted a brief longevity back in cinemas. How could I resist?
I was surprised just how many people packed themselves into the small multiplex screen around me. I often forget just how many worlds this movie touches. It’s the foundation for so many other franchises and styles. It’s a touch stone in sci fi. A classic, cult or otherwise. A few around me were clearly young teens being brought along by their dads. I had to wonder, as the lights dimmed, whether they too were here because they weren’t allowed to watch Burton’s Batman yet.
I suppose it’s no surprise to suggest a movie is better on the big screen. Still, Blade Runner is a mightily stirring experience in the cinema. The spotlights and flares blind you a little bit more in the dark. The sound of the rain and the automated traffic lights ring in your ears. When you’re down in the streets, whether in the middle of foot chase or just trying to order some noodles, the sheer volume of the population is inescapable. There is no free space in Scott’s 2019. You’re either surrounded by faceless crowds, discarded detritus or debris.
Vangelis’ score, one of the all time greats, fills a cinema. It doesn’t just play over the movie. It dances through it. It borrows from the whine of the spinners. The voices of the ten storey adverts. The picked out piano tunes and haunting old melodies. It’s a character. Possibly one of the most emotive in the entire piece. It makes you feel cold. It makes you want to reach for the whiskey and think about your memories. No, not think about them. Question them. Question who put them there exactly.
The mercurial bleeding edge of that alternative November seemed to leak off the screen yesterday. Strangely, something similar happened a few weeks back, when we went to see Joker. There was a sense then of a movie infecting the cinema. Causing some sort of tense, rictus reaction in all of us. A feeling that, at any moment, the shouting would start. With Blade Runner, it was as if all of us were leaning just that little bit closer in our seats. We were moths drawn to the neon tipped flame. Never mind 3D or 4DX. Long before those could jack up the price of a ticket, Ridley Scott made a far more immersive experience.
On the big screen, your eyes have time to wonder in his world. The shots are often wide enough to show off just what Syd Mead and his team developed for Ridley Scott and Douglas Trumbull to create. The borrowed Frank Lloyd Wright architecture and the videophones. The fancy glasses and the kabuki style hockey masks the pole dancers are wearing.
You can’t help look over the imperial, languishing shadows of Tyrell’s sleeping quarters. The decrepit fantasy land of J..F. Sebastian’s home, where his friends and experiments clutter every corner of the frame and an operating lamp hangs over a pool table. The movie is so drenched in metaphor, that I can never shake the feeling that the answer is buried in one single frame, waiting for me to find it. If I could just pause it at the right moment in Deckard’s cluttered flat. If I could just zoom in and enhance, then maybe I’d see it.
A thumbed through copy of Do Androids Dream of Electric Sheep, perhaps. Or the separate drafts of Hampton Fancher’s and David Peoples’ scripts collapsing together to make create what we’re seeing. A world of killer robots and reluctant cops, who are all back lit by riddles and troubling questions about killing your creator. A world where the final moments are not so much a fight as an experience of living in fear, followed by one of the greatest speeches ever given in modern cinema. A speech that is all the more impressive when you learn that Rutger Hauer wrote himself. A fact that resonates all the deeper now he’s passed away himself.
When the movie finished in the abrupt style of the later cuts, with a lift down hissing shut in our faces, people nodded and smiled. We gathered our coats and stepped out into our own November 2019. Dark and wet, but with nothing flying over our heads but the distant trails of planes. Still, the streets did feel different. You caught yourself listening for commands of ‘Cross Now, Cross Now, Cross Now’. I was half expecting a blimp to sail overhead, offering us a chance of a new life off world.
If you get the chance to see Blade Runner during this cinema release, or any future one, I can’t recommend it enough. It’s as good as you remember it. Or maybe it’s as good as the memory they put in on your inception date. One thing I do know for sure: it’s certainly left a far deeper impression on my life than a certain Batman movie.