Blade Runner Analysis

                                                              Photo from the film Blade Runner by Ridley Scott

Overview        

Blade Runner is a science fiction film directed by Ridley Scott in 1982. The screenplay for this complex, 117 minute movie was put together by Hampton Fancher and David Webb Peoples and based off the book by Philip K. Dick. The main cast consists of Harrison Ford as Rick Deckard, Rutger Hauer as Roy Batty, Sean Young as Rachael, Edward James Olmos as Gaff, M. Emmet Walsh as Bryant and Daryl Hannah as Pris. (Blade Runner, IMDb)

Film Review

It is the early 21st century and the technological world is incredibly advanced in Los Angeles. The Tyrell Corporation, a company that produces artificial intelligence and humanoid robots called "replicants", creates an advanced line--the Nexus 6 model. They appear exactly like humans but are superior to humans in many ways: “more human than human.”  The Nexus 6, illegal on earth, are used as slaves in colonies on other planets. Six of them rebel and steal a ship and make their way to earth. Rick Deckard, charged with finding and killing Replicants on earth and known as a Blade Runner, is set with the task to find and kill these rebels. After finding and killing all of the rebels, Rick finds out that they were in fact simply trying to find their creator in order to have him extend their short 4 year lifespan. The film ends with Rick falling in love with Racheal, a Replicant, and them running away from his home to some unknown location.

 Throughout the whole film the lighting is extremely dark, gloomy, and full of grey and brown tones. The only light found was from extremely artificial sources, like from lamps, police lights, advertisement videos. All these sources gave off a very harsh, white lighting with absolute no warmth, or it was indirect. The film is so intensely dark that we sometimes had trouble actually seeing what was going on or the full scene. This was done to create a sense of doubt and confusion on the side of viewer to increase the suspense and cause some anxiety. Keeping a sense of doubt, that the whole picture is not being shown, will keep the viewer guessing, engaged and intrigued throughout the entirety of the film.

                                    Photo from the film "Blade Runner by Ridley Scott

The sounds in this film were also a great way to convey an emotion to the audience.The non-diegetic music was very electronic, artificial and futuristic. This was to keep the audience in the mindset that the world in the film is so advanced that there are very little sounds that are familiar to them. The music was primarily electronic, however every so often the music would turn into something that was very Asian inspired instead. This is possibly due to the fact that Asian culture and population was ever-growing at the time of this film, so it was only natural to believe the future culture of the U.S would be permeated with these Asian influences. The film was also filled with diegetic sounds, like electronics, cars flying, lots of rain, ads playing. They were the sounds of a big city, one where noise pollution is rampant and the only organic sound one hears is that of constant rain. This is to show how industrialised the city of the future has become. There was even a time where the non-diegetic sound overlapped with the diegetic sound, which was when the piano was playing. This happened during one of the only truly intimate scenes of the film. The audience hears the piano as the only soft, comforting music to set the scene and offset the quiet intimacy of Rick’s home from the noise pollution of the outside world.  The characters were also ones who could hear this scene setting music and were the ones in fact playing it.

The sets of this film created the same artificial, polluted and depressing feelings as the lighting did. The sets of the film are for the most part dark, gloomy, and non-organic. The streets are thronged with people and vehicles, with a suggestion that earth is over-populated. All lines of the buildings were incredibly sharp and straight, all the angles were harsh and all designs were extremely geometric. The colours were bland but the architecture was not. All the details seemed to be done according to mathematical reasoning and not to appeal to beauty. There was no tree, bush or flower in sight. There was simply a surplus of buildings, skyscrapers, constant construction and street lamps. The entirety of the set gave off a larger than life feeling. Like industrialisation has taken over so much that humans now seen so small and insignificant. Industrialisation has taken over humans, nature and the world. To the point that humans were now so technological that they have wiped out all organic life.  Which is really not so different than the path we are on to.

                                               Photo from the film"Blade Runner" by Ridley Scott

 Not many characters other than Rick, Racheal and Roy are developed. Interestingly, Racheal and Roy are developed even more, given more emotions and thoughts than their supposedly human counterpart Rick.  Racheal was seen to have so many emotions, internal conflict between being human or Replicant and fear. Roy was given rage, an incredibly strong will and desire to live, love for Pris and true internal thoughts and memories. His final speech is the most emotional part of the whole film, where he says all his moments and all he was will “disappear like tears in the rain.” Then compare these two characters, two robots, to Rick, the human. He is seen to be very distant from people, analytical, doesn’t get angry really, doesn’t get happy, and doesn’t seem to think about things too much. He seems to have become himself artificial and to have lost his humanity. He simply does what he needs to then drinks when he gets home. The only humanity you see is his love for Racheal. This juxtaposition raises the question that the movie questions throughout the film: what is it that makes us humans, human?

Something that really aided in getting those characteristics across was the choice of actors. Harrison Ford was a good choice for this role because he is good at being the manly man. The one people could look to for a hero, or a villain in the Replicants view. He is also good at playing the manly man who can see in his face is a little broken, a little emotionally stunted but means well. Rutger Hauer was also a good choice because physically he looked scary, he looks very angular and like he truly could have been made because he seems like he could be “more human than human”.  When he talks however, you can see the humanity in his eyes, the emotion and the yearning to just simply continue to live on.

            Finally, the last pertinent technique that this film played with a lot was their angles. There were many wide shots, showing how packed, hectic and busy the city streets were. This I think was done to show how insignificant humans are, how over populated the world has become and when shown a large group you really can’t tell the difference between a human and a Replicant. They also did many low angles on Roy when he was on screen to give off an effect of how strong and superior he is over everyone.

Photo from the film "Blade Runner" by Ridley Scott

             While all of these techniques create a consistency in the all-around feel, emotion and impact on the audience, there are still some plot holes in the film. For example, people seemed to simply pop up from room to room without taking into account actual time. For example, towards the end of the movie when Deckard and Roy were fighting each, Roy was running around trying to find Deckard in different rooms. Roy would be in one space then all of a sudden somehow seem to be in another room, but how would he have gotten there. In reality, it is impossible to simply just appear in another room that quickly. This hole could be attributed to editing however. Another hole is that the use of the test blade runners run on people to figure out if they are a replicant or not, at first it seems extremely important. At the beginning of the film they make it seem as if it is impossible to actually tell the difference without these emotional tests. However, there were two characters, namely Chew and Sebastian, who were in fact able to tell if the strangers they were meeting were replicant or not. Therefore how come the test is seen as so pivotal, if at a simple glance or conversation some people are able to notice the difference.(Goofs, IMDb)  

Themes

            Although this movie communicated countless themes - like oppression and control, the mechanical vs the organic, environmental degradation - we believe the most important ones are seen in the questions this movie indirectly asks the viewers: should human-like robots be granted personhood? What are our moral implications towards them? If robots evolve to be this close to having fully developed cognitive capacities and consciousness, should humans be allowed to exploit them and use them as our subjects the way they did in this movie?

(WORD COUNT 1,558)

Course Connections

                One of the connections we can make between Bladerunner and our course material is the concept of the “uncanny valley” we discussed during one of our homework assignment. This refers to the “grey zone” for robots, where their appearance and mechanism results in a combination that make us very repulsed. An uncanny robot would be obviously robotic yet look too similar to us and due to this, we could never grant them personhood. Although they aren’t fully accepted by the movie’s society and are actually being chased down by the police, the replicants in the story don’t give us the revulsion we would feel with an uncanny robot because they look and act identically to humans with only a few exceptions. Due to this, it could be said that scientists in this film managed to surpass the “uncanny valley”.

                Another connection we can make with our course material is the concept of personhood. In this film, there is a debate on whether the replicants should be granted personhood. According to the study guide, personhood is a legal or social category that will vary across cultures and across history. It says “not all humans are persons, and not all persons are humans”.  This seems to be what this movie is trying to get the audience to question. That is, whether the replicants should be considered independent beings and given the rights all persons are given, despite their assumed lack of emotions. It is seen throughout the movie all the way to the end, when the once very automatic police officer Deckard has begun to feel empathy for the replicants he was sent to kill and even fall in love with Rachael.

                This film also touched on objectification. Since these Replicants are not considered persons to society, they are simply objects. They are slaves, the property of whoever owns the robots. They have robots for different tasks, there are even Replicants that they say are purely for sex so that the soldiers don’t get bored. Here you find two layers of objectification, one being female objectification because of the fact that they think it should be the job of women to keep men entertained and let a female Replicant be sexually abuse as her job. The other being that humans think these Replicants are such objects that they can be used essentially as sex dolls, slaves, whatever the humans want them to be simply because they believe they own them.

(Word Count:378)

Personal Appreciation

When it comes to the film techniques, we all agreed that the writers, directors and set creators did a great job at creating a consistency throughout the entire film. Every detail was done for a specific reason, to evoke the same type of feelings from the audience so that they became completely engulfed in this whole new world. From the lighting which created the incredibly dull, dark and eerie feeling, to the sets and sounds that spewed the new technological age. From the lack of humanity in the humans and the abundance of humanity in robots, to the actors who were able to play to those characteristics impeccably. Everything seemed to come together to create this entirely new world. A world that would be terrifying to live in… but at the same time a world that is actually not so different to the world we live in today.

We also agreed that in general, we appreciated the film for it’s depth and interesting subject matter. That film’s quality was great too; the filming, the sound, the acting and the effects really came together to form an enticing experience for the viewer. Story-wise, we also enjoyed being challenged to step into a world where robots have crossed the uncanny valley yet are still being used as man’s experiments. Given how evolved our science has become, we do in fact believe it’s a very possible reality in our foreseeable future and we like the fact that the questions the movie asks us will be questions we’ll soon be asking ourselves as a society. Where some of our opinions started to differ is the complexity of the film. Some found the movie to be quite confusing due to the various philosophical and psychological terms it indirectly mentioned. So because of this confusion, part of us feel like we missed out on some of the film’s rich and interesting content because of this. Some of us also felt that at times the perpetual darkness in the film made it hard to remain constantly engaged. This is because with the film being quite long at a running time of nearly 2 hours, this constant that all the techniques had created made us find that our attention easily wandered. However despite these two minor flaws, we all agree that we would still rate this film 3.5 starts out of five. No film is perfect, so when the fantastic aspects outnumber the flaws, the film has done an extremely well job.

Questions Remaining

               

1.              If you were in this futuristic world with replicants who to the eye were identical to humans, who seemed to have a consciousness and even a sense of self, would you personally believe that they should be granted personhood?

2.             If these robots were granted personhood, then what would be our moral implications towards them be? For example, would we no longer be allowed to exploit these robots and use them for our own means because they have been deemed a person? Would killing one then be considered murder?

3.            Racheal falls in “love” with Rick and he with her. However she is a type of robot that is used as slaves. So following orders one would assume is something that is at least somewhat programmed to do. So when Rick told her to say “kiss me”, to say “I want you”, when she does say those things is it Racheal really feeling those things or is it simply Rick ordering her to and her complying?

Sources

"Blade Runner (1982)." International Movie Database. IMDB, n.d. Web. 23 Oct. 2016.
"Blade Runner Goofs." International Movie Database. IMDB, n.d. Web. 23 Oct. 2016.