BLADE RUNNER III d: Ridley Scott
Harrison Ford in Blade Runner
Also, even if the original version makes it rather clear he is not a Replicant, who really cares? Deckard is listless to the point that whether or not he is an android or just a malaise-ridden human seems of no great import. The more important question about Blade Runner is, Why is it so dull despite such a rich and complex potential to mine?
Additionally, numerous minor moments are taken to be symbolically significant despite the lack of any evidence. In the DVD edition of "The Final Cut," on his own commentary track, Ridley Scott himself ridicules all the nonsense that has been read into the film, including the idea put forth by some critics that Blade Runner was somehow commenting on South African apartheid. While it’s true that any work of science fiction will draw parallels to contemporary issues, this alone does not mean that everything in a sci-fi story is symbolic.
For instance, the very notion that Blade Runner is some sort of profound meditation on existence, on what it means to be human, and on human and non-human bondage is simply not supported by what is on screen. That may have been the filmmakers’ intent, but not the result; instead, that notion is a critical mix up that has plagued film criticism for far too long. Also, Roy Batty, as the rebel leader, is taken to be a convincing antihero, but in any version of the film he is clearly a psychopathic killer despite his subjugation and pains. In a sense, he is a cyber John Brown or, more accurately, a cyber Nat Turner — and Turner was still a murderous psychopath despite having been brutalized in antebellum bondage.
When Blade Runner tries to probe into the ‘depths’ of Batty’s soul by way of his dying soliloquy, all we get are vapidity and pseudopoetry. Neither Batty nor Deckard (even if one accepts the exceedingly thin case for his non-humanity) penetrate deeper issues. Contrast Batty’s "striving for depth and empathy" soliloquy with a similar moment in a far superior — and far simpler — film, Robert Bresson’s Au hasard Balthazar, which follows the peregrinations of a rural donkey over a decade or so of its life till death.
Midway through that film there is a silent scene of sublime transcendence that says infinitely more about the human condition vis-à-vis the suffering it imparts to its subjugated non-human laborers (the stated reason for the Replicant rebellion). In Bresson’s film, the donkey has been bought by a traveling circus and is led into a stable with a host of other animals. The camera then intercuts shots of the eyes of the donkey with a handful of the circus’ other beasts — a tiger, a monkey, and an elephant, among them; the result is a wordless, non-human conversation through which the other animals tell the donkey that they’ve seen worse than it has.
There is simply no scene in Blade Runner that approaches that moment in Au hasard Balthazar. Indeed, Scott doesn’t even try, for Blade Runner is one of those movies whose reputation rests almost entirely upon the ‘criticism of intent’: a noxious reiteration of the intentional fallacy. Fans and supporters of the film simply toss around ideas of what they ‘like’ about the film, supported or not, then cross-reference each others’ speculations, while conveniently ignoring either counterevidence or lack of evidence. That approach then gets supplemented by elements such as the director’s own take on what the film is about, including those found in a handful of documentaries and interviews.
For instance, in 2002 Scott told The Observer that he liked the idea of pain — a subject he claims to explore in his film — due to a sibling’s prolonged death from cancer. However, despite Roy Batty’s occasional winces, there is nothing in Blade Runner (in any version) that suggests that pain is a major theme. Maybe Scott intended it; maybe it’s a quarter-century of wanting to do something in the film and claiming it’s there, but the net fact is that Blade Runner is not an exploration of pain. Period.
Another bandied-about claim is that Blade Runner is somehow ‘visionary,’ which is based upon the suffusion of details that fill the screen — in other words, all the techno stuff. Yet, this is rather standard fare in sci-fi films, from Metropolis to 2001: A Space Odyssey (that film’s special effects director, Douglas Trumbull worked on Blade Runner), in addition to the similarly themed Logan’s Run (a goofier but much more enjoyable effort), Star Wars, and Scott’s own Alien. Among the aforementioned titles, only Metropolis and 2001 could be considered visionary, but for their tales not their technical wizardry.
Even Blade Runner’s most ardent supporters admit how much it stylistically leeches off of Fritz Lang’s Metropolis, especially in regard to its vision of a future Los Angeles. Alien, for its part, certainly laid the visual template of a dark mechanistic future that Blade Runner exploits and that has led to what is known as cyber-punk. In short, Blade Runner is not visionary in any sense of the word; instead, it’s a highly derivative effort — the very antithesis of visionary.
Similarly, Scott is by no means a visionary director. Years ago, he would have been called a studio craftsman because there is never a moment or passage in his work where one immediately knows that it is from a Ridley Scott film. Great, good, or bad, all of Scott’s films are technically fine, but leave no indelible imprint à la Robert Bresson, Michelangelo Antonioni, Stanley Kubrick, or Akira Kurosawa.
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