TIME: Almanac 1993/TIME Almanac 1993.iso/time/caps/82/82blade

Text File | 1992-10-05 | 3.6 KB | 67 lines

                                                                                July 12, 1982 

CINEMA

Blade Runner:  The Pleasures of Texture

    BLADE RUNNER     Directed by Ridley Scott     Screenplay by
Hampton Fancher and David Peoples

Is atmosphere smothering the story lines of smart new
science-fantasy movies?  Is texture overwhelming the text?  On
the evidence of Ridley Scott's Blade Runner--and his previous
thriller, the 1979 Alien--it would seem so. Says David Dryer,
who helped supervise the special photographic effects of Blade
Runner:  "The environment in the film is almost a protagonist."
 He and other talented craftsmen are lavishing their
imaginations on graphic design--on high-tech spaceships and deja
vu futurism--and allowing the characters to wander through a
labyrinthine narrative like lost dwarfs. Moviegoers seeking the
smooth propulsion of story line look at these films and ask,
"What's going on here?"  Directors and effects specialists,
plumbing the resources of a technology that can show what has
never been seen before, answer:  "The here is what's going on.
The setting, the surroundings, the texture."

In Blade Runner, an adaptation of Philip K. Dick's 1969 novel
Do Androids Dream of Electric Sheep?, the here is quite enough:
 a vision of dark, cramped, urban squalor. This is Los Angeles
in the year 2019, when most of the earth's inhabitants have
colonized other plants, and only a polyglot refuse heap of
humanity remains. Los Angeles is a Japanized nighttown of sleaze
and silicon, fetid steam and perpetual rain. This baroque
Tomorrowland juggles images from a dozen yesterdays:  walk out
of the rain and into a 1940s world of overhead fan blades and
women in shoulder-pad jackets moving to the cadence of a keening
alto sax. The filthy streets are clogged with Third World losers
and carnivores, while 10 ft. above them the police cars hover,
monitoring the future as it molders into chaos.

Some people don't belong in this decaying cityscape. One is
Deckard (Harrison Ford), a burnt-out, Bogie-style detective; the
others are "replicants," robots of advanced design who have
infiltrated the city to find their creator and prolong their
short, violent lives beyond the allotted four-year span.
Deckard, brought back into service to kill the quartet of
replicants, finds it no easy job--for they are powerful and
cunning, and he is tired beyond caring. Moreover, Deckard's
emotions have been short-circuited from a lifetime of dirty
police work, whereas the emotions of the replicant leader Batty
(Rutger Hauer) are flowering just as his "termination date"
nears. And so the twin pursuits begin. Deckard, a man from the
past, races against time to track down his quarry; Batty, the
man of the future, races for as much time as genetic engineering
and his appetite for life will grant him.

Blade Runner, like its setting, is a beautiful, deadly organism
that devours life; and Ford, the cockily engaging Star Warrior
of Raiders of the Lost Art, allows his heroic stature to shrivel
inside it. In comparison, Hauer's silver-haired superman is more
human than human, finally more complex than Ford's victimized
flatfoot. Because of this imbalance of star roles, and because
this drastically recut movie has a plot that proceeds by fits
and stops, Blade Runner is likely to disappoint moviegoers
hoping for sleek thrills and derring- do. But as a display
terminal for the wizardry of Designers Lawrence G. Paull,
Douglas Trumbull and Syd Mead, the movie delivers. The pleasures
of texture have rarely been so savory.

--By Richard Corliss