Great Scott?

Unlike all the other older movies I've written about here over the last several months, I have actually seen director Ridley Scott's Blade Runner before. But it somehow ballooned into this massive running gag that one of the people I work with hasn't, so the movie keeps coming up all the time. And it recently sank in with me how long it had been since I'd seen it; I barely remembered the film at all. I couldn't even remember if I'd actually seen the original, or one of the numerous alternate versions that have sprang up over the years. So I decided to go back and check it out again -- the original release. (I figured it had to have earned its status as a sci-fi classic on the strength of that version, regardless of what improvements or diminishments might have come later.)

Watching it with mostly fresh eyes, I couldn't entirely see what the fuss was all about. But I first have to acknowledge my likely bias: this movie is a film-noir, through and through, and as I noted not long ago, those movies don't really do it for me. Make no mistake, Blade Runner is a moody, brooding detective story with a "hard-boiled" character at the core that interacts with a femme fatale, an adversary more talked about than seen -- hell, in this original version, he even narrates his adventure. Rather extensively. Yup, this is film-noir, and has the rather slow pace characteristic of one.

The movie does look pretty incredible, though. We're more than 25 years on now, but the visual effects in the movie still hold up today. I found the quality of the design undercut just a bit at times when it seemed to crib from Ridley Scott's other (true, in my book) sci-fi masterpiece, Alien. It's certainly not that way throughout; if nothing else, the near-constant presence of neon changes the tone. But every now and then, a mostly dark scene lit with stark shafts of light comes along, and it looks like it's taking place aboard the Nostromo somewhere.

The acting is a bit hit and miss. Harrison Ford is good on screen as the main character, though I find that narration I mentioned to be overly dry, like it was recorded in a single day, single take, in maybe a 30 minute session. Some movies are made on the strength of great narration, but this isn't one of them, and I can see why Ridley Scott wanted to excise this element from later versions of the film.

Rutger Hauer commands the screen in any scene where he appears, but I find the movie somewhat flawed in the when and where it uses him. With the film on course for a confrontation between his character and Ford's, it seems rather odd to me that his character barely gets fleshed out in the first hour. He has only one major scene until a sudden divergence at the top of act three, at which time he actually takes complete focus in the story, with Ford's character vanishing from screen for 15 minutes. A very odd way to structure a story, if you ask me, as opposed to intercutting between both characters and developing them in tandem along the way.

A number of other good actors appear in roles that do help flesh out the universe, while not really making you take too much notice of them individually: Edward James Olmos, William Sanderson, and Joanna Cassidy. As a love interest, Sean young isn't the most... well... interesting presence in the movie, but does alright. Daryl Hannah basically stinks, as she did in pretty much every movie she made in the 80s; she wasn't finding roles with her acting abilities.

I found Blade Runner slow, but not really ever boring. It was clearly inspirational to other films in many good ways, though I didn't think it a perfect specimen on its own. I can see why others would rank it a top film (it's in both the IMDB Top 250 and the 10th anniversary revised version of the AFI Top 100), but I think those high marks are given by people who value style over content in their movies. Blade Runner is drowning in the former and a bit thin in the latter, in my opinion. I rate Blade Runner a C.