BLADE RUNNER

   Film (1982). Blade Runner Partnership-Ladd Co.-Sir Run Run Shaw/Warner. Dir Ridley SCOTT, starring Harrison Ford, Rutger Hauer, Sean Young, Daryl Hannah, William Sanderson. Screenplay Hampton Fancher, David Peoples, based on DO ANDROIDS DREAM OF ELECTRIC SHEEP? (1968) by Philip K. DICK. 117 mins (US). Colour.

   In a future Los Angeles, Rick Deckard (Ford), whose job it is to destroy renegade "replicants" (ANDROIDS), has to hunt down a particularly dangerous group of advanced androids designed as slaves; their anger against humanity is all the greater because they have been given only a very limited lifespan.The screenplay and the film itself went through a number of stages, with Peoples radically rewriting Fancher's original script only to see much of his filling-out material lost. The first US cut released (preview audiences only) was much longer than the 117min final US cut, and then for the UK/Europe distribution the film was hardened again with some of the more brutal sequences restored. Some important themes from Dick's book survive in a mystifying way: it is never explained in the film that most healthy humans have emigrated off a pollution-ridden Earth - though the prematurely ageing robotics expert, Sebastian (Sanderson), is meant to be one of the sick ones that stayed home; nor is the destruction of nearly all animal life explained - most surviving animals being artificial - though references to it are made throughout, notably in the android empathy test, where lack of sensitivity to animal life is a key clue to the androids' supposed lack of real feeling. Strangest of all, the possibility that Deckard himself may be a "replicant" exists in the final cut only as a subtext, unmistakable once pointed out, but missed by almost all audiences except, Ridley Scott has said, the French. Scott's own revisionist version, Blade Runner: The Director's Cut (1992, 114 mins), makes the subtext a little clearer and deletes the voice-over narration, though it was somewhat less changed from the original than many people expected.BR has many narrative flaws, including a happy ending tacked on allegedly against the director's wishes, but remains one of the most important sf movies made. The density of information given right across the screen in the future setting (production designer Lawrence Paull, visual consultant Syd Mead, special-photographic-effects supervisor Douglas Trumbull, with Scott himself being primarily responsible for the look of the film) is extraordinary, showing almost for the first time - though fans had spent years hoping - how visually sophisticated sf in film form can be. BR's film-noir mise-en-scene, with its ubiquitous advertisements (and rain), its Los Angeles dominated by an oriental population, its punk female android (Hannah), its high-tech traffic alongside bicycles, its steam and smoke, its shabbiness and glitter cheek-by-jowl, is film's first (and still best) precursor of the movement we now call CYBERPUNK. BR is even better, particularly in the director's cut, and much more ambitious, than Scott's previous sf film, ALIEN, and is especially interesting in its treatment of the central theme: whether "humanity" is something innate or whether it can be "programmed" in - or, indeed, out.

   PN

   See also: CINEMA; HOLOCAUST AND AFTER; HUGO; MUSIC.