Wasn't Tomorrow Wonderful?* (William Andreassen on Blade Runner)

Several years ago I joined the ranks of those obssessed with the movie Blade Runner. But my friend William Andreassen has been part of the club for going on 26 years! It's a club with a vast membership. How vast? Google "blade runner" and see how many fansites come up devoted to the characters, themes or just plain minutiae related to the film. Like other movies with a passionate following, Blade Runner ends with a riddle. Like Citizen Kane's "rosebud", the final lines of Blade Runner continue to inspire debate and speculation. Andreassen doesn't wade into those questions, but he's been watching the new 5-disc collector's package and offers this appreciation.

Why do I continue to be alarmingly obsessed with the 1982 seminal sci-fi classic Blade Runner? Nearly twenty-six years have passed since that wide-eyed, celluloid mad thirteen year-old sat in the dark with his father and experienced something positively otherworldly, something unlike any previous movie I’d ever seen (or since, honestly). Even at that still somewhat impressionable age, I believe that I was aware that I was witnessing something special, something to endure, something which would be relevant to future viewers. Any one element—the jaw-dropping production design, the thought-provoking screenplay, the evocative score by Vangelis-made it unique, but there was a cumulative effect working, an amalgamation of qualities that certified its place in a Class of One among science fiction. The only other sci-fi film I can recall which sets itself apart to the same degree would be Stanley Kubrick’s 2001.

Based on Philip K. Dick’s wonderfully titled “Do Androids Dream of Electric Sheep?”, Blade Runner follows one Rick Deckard, a retired cop, or “blade runner” who in the bleak future of Los Angeles in 2019 is coerced into another, final mission: track down six renegade androids who have illegally escaped from another locale in the solar system, “an off-world colony,” where citizens have the “chance to begin again.” At the service of these citizens are the said androids, or REPLICANTS. These are no standard issue cyborgs; replicants have been intricately designed by the Tyrell Corporation, a megacorporation which produces slave labor which are more “more human than human.”

Hampton Fancher’s and David Webb People’s screenplay introduces us to these doomed replicants, these, dare I say it? Souls? Perhaps. Naturally, these are not men of flesh and blood, but rather microchips and miles of fiber optic nerves, coiled in a housing that indeed appears to be quite human. These androids reason, have perspectives, have memories. Droids aren’t supposed to think, right? That’s the user’s job. But the Tyrell Corporation designed a model that eclipses anything we’ve ever seen. But why? These machines are meant to be of service to the humans, to do their bidding. Users have more important things to do, like purchasing things. And moving to the off-world colonies for the promise of a better life. Who could blame them? The L.A. we see in director Ridley Scott’s (The Duellists, Legend) vision is a perpetual nighttime of rain and blurred neon. The sort of landscape Deckard inhabits with weary ease.

Scott, having already broken new ground with the horror sci-fi Alien in 1979, threw down the gauntlet yet again for what a science fiction film should look and sound like. As numerous sources attest, Scott’s unstinting perfectionism set an almost impossibly high bar, a measure against every f/x film thereafter would be measured. And with any trailblazer, scores of imitators will follow. And they did. Even other action-type films, end-of-world sagas, superhero adventures, they all bore the influence. But Blade Runner was also about the “how”, just how every great film absolutely is, in my opinion. Yes, Scott also set the standard for “how” a sci-fi film should be. How it lives and breathes. Multiple viewings reveal not just layers of the screenplay, an endlessly fascinating essay on who we think we really are, but also the embedded themes of imagery, things not easily put into words. It has been said that film is primarily a medium of emotion; Blade Runner is one to cite for the defense of that notion, in spades.

Even though I’m a pretty rabid film nut (as the author of this blog could attest), I rarely purchase DVDs. I love many, many movies, but there are relatively few I need to have at the ready to study, to revisit and enjoy at a moment’s notice. While I could easily add hundreds if I had the disposable income (and a lack of conscience as to far better use of the fundage), the ones I do own include bona-fide gems such as Being John Malkovich, Brazil, Dazed & Confused, and Fargo. Blade Runner is a very select specimen, a film that meets the aforementioned criteria and far more. The old no-frills Warner Brothers single disc of the Director’s Cut never made my collection, because I knew that a movie this special would someday get a royal treatment. And boy, did it!

To summarize: first you have the 2 disc set: it contains the recently minted “Final Cut” of the movie (with varying separate commentaries) and a superior 3 + hour documentary on the rather tumultuous production of the film. You could alternatively purchase the 4-disc set, which includes the above, plus the original 1982 theatrical version (with voiceover), a longer European version, the 1992 “Director’s Cut”, and the “Enhancement Archive,” which contains a litany of featurettes chronicling production, as well as interviews with the source material’s author. Also included is an elegant, heartfelt tribute to the film’s cinematographer, Jordan Cronenweth, who also lensed another favorite of mine, Stop Making Sense. His breathtaking, inventive work is largely responsible for why Blade Runner is so stunning.

I bought none of the above collections. Nope, I went for the ultimate fanatic’s package, The Five-Disc Limited Edition Gift Set which includes, of course, all of the above, PLUS, a workprint version of the film (which is assembled prior to complete color correction, f/x tweaks, voiceover and sound effects edits, and scoring cues) with commentary, and another featurette. A toy replica of Deckard’s spinner vehicle, an origami unicorn, an impressive art folio, and a lenticular (3-D hologram thingy) of a film clip accompanies the set, all contained in a spiffy plastic briefcase modeled after Deckard’s own. Yeah, I know, but this was a once-in-a-lifetime purchase. Now you get the notion that this film is important to me.

Like any seminal work I’ve encountered, Blade Runner has so infused itself into my cerebrum that I find myself recalling bits when Life seems to imitate Art. During Orientation Week as I was beginning doctoral studies in audiology some years ago, a Myers-Briggs personality test was administered. As I replied to the manipulative inquiries, I was reminded of the Voight-Kampf test, which viewers may recall is the oral questionnaire the blade runners use to determine if their subject is a replicant. As I creatively answered each question, it occurred to me- what sort of personality makes the best audiologist? Or is it the other way around? Do they want replicants? My mind reeled, and I was being ridiculous. My twenty classmates and I were later subjected to a lengthy explanation by one of the university’s psych profs, a session where the aggregate results were expounded upon at great length. He explained that we were Thinking Introverts, or so went that classification dichotomies, as they’re known. Ideal for audiologists! he cried. Hmmmm.

So, now it’s twenty-six years after Blade Runner was originally screened. We are now eleven years away from the year in which the film is set. It seemed so impossibly far away in ’82. Yes, such a future would be characterized by post-modern architecture and gravity-defying vehicles. A few years before I saw the film, I was on the monkey bars chatting with classmates as to what the future would be like. We imagined that even in the 1990s we’d be flying in souped up astro-vehicles over our former terrestrial thoroughfares and routinely traveling through outer space. But as the lyrics went in that They Might Be Giants song:

I’m trapped in a world before later on
Where’s my hovercraft?
Where’s my jet pack?
Where’s the font of acquired wisdom
That eludes me now?
Where’s all the complication
We won’t see around?

OK, so perhaps that’s not entirely accurate. But that is what is so disturbing. Blade Runner, so embodied by its observations about human nature, culture, technology, metaphysics, and emotion, is so very relevant now. I guess Dick called it, for every ten paces forged ahead with technology, we take several more into the dark abyss of regression, a very sad place, indeed. Author and compadre Christian film buff Jeffrey Overstreet lists Blade Runner as a film “For Ambitious Discussion Groups” in his excellent Through a Screen Darkly book. I would’ve loved to have had the opportunity to have chatted with Msr. Dick about the antidote to the darkness of which he wrote, the Great Hope mankind most certainly has.



*Title absconded from a Waitresses album, circa Blade Runner’s original release.

Ridley Scott and Philip K. Dick circa 1981