Of the sci-fi genre for me it will always be #1. The whole thing is just perfect, there's no other movie that comes close to the world that is envisioned in Blade Runner.
People usually do not remember what happened turn by turn but they do remember what it made them feel.
Funnily enough, in the movie, the humans have little no feelings but the androids do -- and that is the central question that the movie made me consider -- what makes us human.
I am ofcourse biased because Blade Runner (original) is not only on my top 5 scifi movie list but also on my top 5 movie list. So much so that I am reluctant to watch 2049.
To me, the whole point of Batty's final scene is his empathy. PKD made a big point of empathy being the defining quality of humans and even the Voight-Kampff test relies on it.
I think Blade Runner and Alien helped destroy mainstream science fiction.
Before Blade Runner almost anything could be science fiction. After Blade Runner science fiction meant detective noir with #tech_upgrade - clones, memory implants, dystopia. Or it was US truckers and/or the military fighting nasty aliens in spaaaaaaace. (Star Wars and its magic space knights was always more fantasy with a science fiction stage set.)
Blade Runner did it far better than the others, but then we had decades of mostly mediocre book knock-offs, especially in the UK. (Gibson gets a pass for taking the new trope even further by being a brilliant stylist, mixing in some tech orientalism, and inventing cyberspace.)
It's a stunning, iconic masterpiece of a movie with an unfortunate chilling cultural effect.
And ironically the Philip K Dick original was... very different.
(Gibson gets a pass for taking the new trope even further by being a brilliant stylist, mixing in some tech orientalism, and inventing cyberspace.)
Gibson was horrified after walking out of a theater after seeing Blade Runner; in that Scott had visualized and shown onscreen the aesthetic of (at that point unpublished) Neuromancer.
>(Gibson gets a pass for taking the new trope even further by being a brilliant stylist, mixing in some tech orientalism, and inventing cyberspace.)
Gibson was also writing in that vein long before the release of Neuromancer, which repurposes some themes, plotlines, and even characters from his earlier short stories. And my understanding is he was working on Neuromancer before Blade Runner was released and without knowledge of it during its production.
I will say I'm reading through his short story compilation Burning Chrome and it is amazing. I don't think he ever matched Neuromancer with his other novels and over time they've just exposed his weaknesses more and more, which is a bummer. But he's absolutely at the top of his game in short stories.
No, Dick did not collaborate with Scott at all. He was not formally involved in the development of the film. He didn't write anything and wasn't given any say.
Dick actually hated the first drafts of the script, which deviated even more from the novel. He was also upset that he was asked to write a new novelization of the script that would essentially replace DADoES in print. He made comments in the press about how Hollywood was ruining his book.
He really only changed his tune after his agent persuaded the producers to invite Dick to the set in 1981. He was basically coddled by Scott and his team (who was told Dick was creating bad publicity and needed to be assuaged) for a whole day, shown around the set and given a rough cut preview that included several major sequences and unfinished VFX by Douglas Trumbull.
After that, he not only spoke highly of the screenplay (which had evolved with the help of David Peoples, though it didn't exactly get more faithful to the novel), he wrote enthusiastically about how the film was going to change the science fiction genre for ever. Unfortunately, he never got to see the finished film.
>Before Blade Runner almost anything could be science fiction. After Blade Runner science fiction meant detective noir with #tech_upgrade - clones, memory implants, dystopia.
It didn't destroy anything; it just set a mold for the next few decades that was used to cookie-cut copies from. It cut a rut, and movie execs LOOOOVE a profitable rut to wallow in.
Same. The atmosphere it creates is still unmatched.
I wish I hadn’t watched BR2049. Felt like a cheap parody, from the torrents of water falling on the windows, to the fake light effects, to the cartoonish villain who of course had to butcher a human-looking replicant while monologuing in order to get a proper introduction.
Felt like Villeneuve agonized & sweated blood trying to make a homage to the original film (whose own appeal was not immediately grasped at release); which ended up not letting his own movie be as good as it could've been.
There are some acting missteps that unfortunately flaw the film for me.
Harrison Ford is not very good in it—perhaps not a great actor generally. His pretending to be a nerd/fan in Zhora's dressing room is too cringey to watch it's so bad… I feel like I'm watching Mickey Rooney playing Mr. Yunioshi in Breakfast at Tiffany's.
And the actor that played Leon (Brion James) is also difficult to watch (he was a distraction in The Fifth Element as well).
Harrison Ford is not very good in it—perhaps not a great actor generally. His pretending to be a nerd/fan in Zhora's dressing room is too cringey to watch it's so bad…
Harrison Ford is playing Rock Deckard, a detective (not an actor) who hunts down artificial humans. At least to begin with, he and his fellow detectives don't have much respect for the replicants, so he thinks it will be easy to manipulate Zhora and get some information out of her before he kills her.
No, he's not. He's sushi, cold fish. He doesn't even know for sure if he's human. He can't be a good actor.
Actually, if he's a replicant made to believe he's human, he might even believe he was doing a good job, because he'd be clueless about what good acting is supposed to look like.
I thought Brion James was fantastic in The Fifth Element because he's one of the few slapstick outlets. He comes off as sorta military-scary, and ends up frozen like a Looney-Tunes popsicle in the freezer a few minutes later , and dead-pan military is a kind-of-funny partner to Corbin being an outlaw bachelor. He then remains the dead-pan receiver of abuse from the president, etc.
I agree about Harrison Ford, though I don't know who would've done it better at that moment in history.
aside : The Fifth Element is considered to be one of the noisiest distracting sci-fi movies ever, so to hear your main distraction was Brion James made me grin.
Huh? Between Kassovitz trying to rob Corbin, the priest's sidekick, the head scientist, the archeologist with "Aziz, light!", the Chris Rock character, Corbins "fake wife" suggestion, the space port ticket counter gags, the president, and several others, the movie hardly has "few" slapstick outlets.
Right, they're all over the place. That's just the kind of movie that it is, And to the extent that he serves as one of the distractions, it's complementing the tone and vibe of the movie. Like I wholeheartedly agree that he was a perfect fit for that movie, but not because he was one of a small handful of slapstick elements.
Yeah, I would go so far as to say highlight of his career. Extremely, extremely good, like can't look away good. I suppose it's all just opinion at some level, but this is sticking out like a sore thumb is perhaps the hardest one to defend that I'm seeing in the whole thread.
I remember so many details of his brief appearances in that movie, but what really stands out are his eyes -- intense, fearful, paranoid, menacing. (Suitable, given that scene where Deckard and Leon extract J. F. Sebastian's name.)
He almost always played a thug or heavy, and so I'm not sure what other film of his could have ranked higher than this. His scene sitting across the table from Holden is classic.
I don't remember him playing a heavy in The King is Alive, which is not a classic but a rather dark Dogme 95 film, of all things.
