Blade Runner at 25, Why the F/X Still Matter

mattnyc99 writes "Today marks the 25th anniversary of the release of Blade Runner, Ridley Scott's dark vision of the future that changed the future of filmmaking and still stands up today, argues Adam Savage of The MythBusters (and the F/X crews of The Matrix and Star Wars). Between the "lived-in science fiction," pre-CGI master models, futuristic cityscapes and tricked-out cars, don't you agree? And after we got the first official glimpse of him from Indiana Jones 4 this weekend, isn't Harrison Ford still the man?"

i love blade runner

[circletimessquare]

there is no more perfect science fiction movie to me

the problem with most science fiction movies is that the sampling of the philosophical implications of their subject matter is too shallow (or they are outright fantasy riffs without any attempt at philosophisizing). you don't get that with a good sci fi book. a good sci fi book gets you to really think and wonder. a good science fiction movie just usually entertains you... sometimes entertains you REALLY well, but the thinking part isn't usually there

but blade runner really got to me. especially the scenes at the end, with deckard and batty, the movie collapsed all of the science fiction trappings into meaning: the essential human struggles with life and death and what is the whole damn point anyway? blade runner really sticks with you. every time i watch it i think of something new

i really don't know of a better example of how deeply a 2 hour scifi movie can really get to you in a deep way

well maybe contact [imdb.com], but contact comes second in my mind to blade runner

Re:it would have been way better

[illegalcortex]

it would have been way better if they would have stuck more to the book

It would have been a different movie if they had stuck more to the book. Whether or not it would have been a good movie is up in the air. In any case, BR is a good movie, so let's just count ourselves lucky and enjoy what we have.

Gritty non-scifi scifi

[grapeape]

What made Blade Runner great was what made Dark City, Liquid Sky and the Original Manchurian Candidate good sci-fi, realisim. Yes it had flying cars, but things were still pretty much the same, people still worked, took taxi's, wore semi-normal looking clothing and ate regular food. The haunting subtle differences are what made it future we could accept as real which in turn made the "dark" future all that more scary because we belived at least for a couple hours that it could happen. Having Ridley Scott at the helm didnt hurt much either.

Edge

[hack slash]

In case you haven't seen it yet, the UK Channel 4 documentary On The Edge of Blade Runner [google.com].

REALLY looking forward to the super-duper-mega box set coming out, my HD to DVD conversion of the DC is nice but the 5.1 audio doesn't sound much better than the original 2.0 fed through Pro-Logic II, and getting a proper copy of theatrical version is going go to be great (no more putting up with the laserdisc transfer) - I just hope they don't copy Lucas and make it a 4:3 letterbox release like the OOT.

Re:it would have been way better

[DeepHurtn!]

Absolutely the right attitude, IMHO! A lot of the stuff in Do Androids Dream of Electric Sheep would be impossible to film in anything like a mainstream movie, I suspect. Mercerism? Buster Friendly? C'mon, it would either have to be camp or experimental. The book and the novel are totally different beasts. In this case, we have a brilliant novel and a brilliant movie. 'Nuff said.

Re:But Is Deckard A Replicant? Or Not?

[TheRaven64]

- Could you trust a replicant to kill other replicants? Why did the police trust Deckard?

Why not? One of the core themes of the book and the film was that replicants lack empathy. Without empathy, there is nothing stopping them from killing, if they are going to gain something (e.g. money) from it.

Re:How does that get modded up?

[Anonymous Coward]

The guy who made the movie could argue that Deckard was a repressed homosexual communist dyslexic Jew, but since none of that is ever conclusively answered in the film it's still argument fodder. There's a world of difference between "what I meant" and "what I actually showed," y'know.

That said, Deckard's a robot and you're a douche.

Re:i love blade runner

[samkass]

The thing is, both Blade Runner and Contact are a pale shadow of their books. "Do Androids Dream of Electric Sheep", on which Bladerunner is theoretically based, contains many times the depth and probably only takes you the same couple hours to read. In Contact, the entire point of the book was more or less missed by the movie-- in the book, the dichotomy between faith and science is addressed by the ending. The movie makes it into a gimmicky twist.

I agree that Blade Runner is one of the best science fiction movies of all time. And it stands up amazingly well to modern special effects and scenery. But the movie is still a movie-- entertainment with tunnel-vision, spoon-fed philosophy.

The reason

[SatanicPuppy]

The reason that the effects were so good is that they were by and large accents, rather than fabricated whole cloth. Big flashy effects still look dated very quickly, because the technology is improving so rapidly. I'd go so far as to say that the original Star Wars series (4-6) will stand up better than the newer series because the limitations of the day forced them to use more "real" models, rather than quickly dated CG.

Blade Runner was subtle; it used environmental effects and models to create a sense of the future that the viewer could fill in with his own imagination.

Re:i love blade runner

[spun]

I don't know, I put it in my top three. For me, it ranks with Forbidden Planet and The Day the Earth Stood Still.

Uhhhh, Contact? Good lord. Okay book, awful movie, IMHO.

Re:i love blade runner

[rossifer]

"Do Androids Dream of Electric Sheep", on which Bladerunner is theoretically based, contains many times the depth and probably only takes you the same couple hours to read.

I disagree, sorta. They're such different stories, with such different protagonists, themes, and antagonists, I don't think the comparison is apt. An earlier post said it pretty well: there's no way of saying whether a movie that closely followed the book would be great. The movie "Blade Runner" is great, so let's enjoy it for what it is.

As for one being deeper than the other... personally, I find the movie's resolution of the synthetic/authentic dichotomy more satisfying. The book says that the synthetic is never as "good" as the authentic. The movie says it can be.

This analysis is consonant with my impression of Penrose re: AI's potential. Penrose says we can't simulate intelligence using Von Neumann computers because intelligence relies on quantum-mechanical nondeterministic computation to evade Godel's incompleteness theorem. I say that Penrose has made at least three significant errors: 1) his argument that human intelligence does successfully evade Godel's incompleteness theorem is pure speculation; 2) simple electrochemical models of brain operation include nondeterministic elements (neurotransmitter diffusion, etc.), without any need for quantum-level effects; and 3) that it would be difficult to add probabilistic operations to Von Neumann systems if nondeterministic elements were found to be necessary to simulate intelligence.

Don't get me wrong. I love reading PKD's stuff and am a huge fan. I just happen to disagree with his thesis in that story ("Do Androids Dream of Electric Sheep"), and that disagreement leads me to be more satisfied with Ridley Scott's variation on the story.

Regards,
Ross

Re:Visual density

[Scutter]

realism and science fiction, two words that should in a sense be mutually exclusive

I disagree. I think when you can blend the two successfully, you achieve a much more believable effect. This is why we don't buy the Star Trek future quite as readily as the Bladrunner (or Alien or Outland) future. We inherently believe that in our real future, things will be more or less the same as they are now. It will be the little things that will be different. We'll use cellphones instead of payphones. We'll pay with "credits" instead of "dollars". We'll have voice-controlled appliances instead of switches. We'll have a few flying cars in the air, but mostly it'll still be ground traffic. These are the things that Bladerunner brought to the table and they are partly why it's believable sci fi, even today. Especially today, when some of the little things in the film have already come to pass.

Movies like this always remind me of those old Tom Selleck AT&T commercials: "Imagine taking a college course from the beach. You will!" Realism + Sci Fi.

Are we talking FX

[hey!]

or design?

Or are they the same thing?

One of the most convincing Sci Fi movies of all time was The Day the Earth Stood Still. The key to that movie is the relentless ordinariness of the sets, the way the scenes are short, and the actors (other than Michael Rennie whose phsyiogamy is a special effect in itself).

It seems to me that (relying on my twenty five year old memory of the movie) Blade Runner's hybrid noir/ginza landscape works in the same way, suggesting that the people who inhabit it are overstimulated on the outside and empty on the inside. The most human people are those who are the replicants, who at least aspire to something.

Re:Stupid movie then and now.

[Anonymous Coward]

"When this movie came out, Reagan was President, the Cold War was on, and the real vision of the future was more about mushroom clouds rising up over all of Europe, Asia and North America. At least if the world was going to end, it wouldn't just burn out like BR did, it would go out in a blaze of manly glory."

And then what?

Read the book [wikipedia.org] (but don't read too much of the wikipedia page if you want to avoid spoilers for it). I don't think it is clearly mentioned in the movie, but in the book the setting *is* post-nuclear war. That's why so many people are being encouraged to go to the "off-world colonies", and why the place is in such a dilapidated state (most people have left, and the weather is screwed up).

Ah, you're probably trolling anyway.

Re:Stupid movie then and now.

[TheWoozle]

Are you by chance a Hollywood producer? Just like them, you seem to think "science fiction" is just another backdrop for a story: one with cool-looking futuristic stuff and gratuitous robots. I call this the "Michael Bay" phenomenon.

On the other hand, most fans of real science fiction (the kind in books) are fans because of the interesting implications of technology extrapolated into the distant (or not-so-distant) future, the philosophical overtones, and the thought-provoking scenarios, and the unforgettable characters (Lazarus Long, anybody?).

All in all, I prefer "The Moon is a Harsh Mistress" over "Podkayne of Mars"...and if you don't know what I'm talking about, then perhaps you should stick to watching Pirates of the Carribean 3.

I've always kind of wished

[Adult film producer]

that the umbrellas in Blade Runner with the neon/glo-stick cores would have caught on in real life.. that was the one of those little things about blade runner that made it so appealing for me at least, much more so than the special effects, it was the atmosphere & aroma that the producers built into the blade runner future, you could almost smell what it was like in the era of replicants.

Models and F/X still "Real"

[writerjosh]

Props and in-camera F/X shots still hold up over time because they are shots of something real. What I mean is, a physical model has a depth and weight that a CGI model has difficulty replicating. Think of that Star Destroyer chasing Princess Leia's ship in the opening scene of A New Hope. Doesn't that Star Destroyer just "feel" huge and heavy? It lumbers across the screen as though it's a real flying fortress. Cut to the mega-ships of Revenge of the Sith. Yeah, they look great and fancy, but do they feel as "real" as the model ships of A New Hope? IMHO, no. CGI ships float in an unreal realm. Models have real depth and weight that translates to the screen as "real." Another example would be the puppet Yoda vs. the CGI Yoda. Which one is more real and true in your mind?

Also, consider the more modern pseudo-sci-fi movie Children of Men. Now there's a fantastic example of F/X and set design over CGI. Every shot feels like it comes from a real place because every shot is a "real" set piece or "real" in-camera F/X. Don't get me wrong, CGI has made movies explode into our imagination (Lord of the Rings, for example), but real models and in-camera F/X shouldn't be lost to the ages. Yes, they're more expensive and time-consuming, but the long-term effect is worth it.

Re:i love blade runner

[elrous0]

Well, since it's impossible to predict future fashion trends, you're stuck with only two options--either go for broke and create "futuristic" fashions (and forever date the movie) or play it down and have everyone basically dress in conservative contemporary style (and risk confusing your audience). Personally, I would generally go for the latter, since it holds up so much better over time (t-shirts, jeans, dress shirts, basic business suits, etc. rarely change much).

In Blade Runner, Scott mixes the two pretty effectively. Decker, Rachael, the police chief, etc. dress pretty conservatively, and they hold up pretty well. The extras and many of the replicants, on the other hand, look like leftovers from a Sex Pistols concert.

Re:Maybe I'm too young - I didn't find BR special

[JustNiz]

But does it all just come down to eye-candy for you?

The point about BR (at least for me) is that it was one of the last Sci-Fi movies that had a great plot, which meant the special effects were really secondary. Even without any special effects, its still a great story. It was also largely responsible for a whole new dark dystopian view of the future, which still feels infinitely more probable than the standard sterile white corridors and ray guns of nearly all the other Sci-Fi movies of the same period.

Its sad but it seems video games and most movies have all gone the same way of relying on ever-more dramatic graphics/CGI/effects to make up for the lack of a decent plot (or in the case of games, intellectually challenging gameplay).

Re:But Is Deckard A Replicant? Or Not?

[flyingsquid]

Personally, I hope that the new edition won't add anything to settle the argument... that would be a tragedy on the order of having Greedo fire first. At the end of the Director's Cut, we're left with hints that Deckard could be a replicant- that line where Rachel asks him if he's ever taken the test, the unicorn dream... but we don't know for sure. And I like that ambiguity, because it forces you to ask: well, what does it really matter if he is, or if he isn't? He has emotions, fears, dreams, memories; those exist whether or not the Tyrrell corporation manufactured him. Even if his memories are manufactured, they feel real and therefore define who he is. The only major difference is that he won't have long to live if he's a replicant, but again the movie asks, what's the difference? We all die, and we never know when it will come.

If Ridley Scott does alter that, I think we're going to hear a lot of cries to the effect of "you ruined my childhood memories!" or rather, the memories of my angst-filled adolescence when late at night, watching TV alone in the dark, I stumbled across Blade Runner on TV...

Re:Deep. . ?

[PCM2]

The film adaptation looked nice, and it was certainly dark and miserable enough to be taken 'seriously' by film critics at large, but honestly, I got the same message out of Terminator II. "Humans are paradoxical and life sucks after nuclear war."

Not meaning to flame, but ... if you're too dense to get it, you can't very well blame the filmmakers.

Re:Special edition DVD?

[Hawthorne01]

Some people said that SACD or DVD-Audio would be the next CD...

Oops. :-)

Re:Maybe?

[lgw]

Plus, it's not even in the movie, it's speculation based on the movie.

I've watched BR a few times looking for any actual on-screen evidence, and I can't see anything. I think the whole point was that, if you can fake memories, *anyone* could be a replicant and not notice it, not simply the lead.

Re:Special edition DVD?

[LihTox]

some people said the same back in 00-02 about dvd vs vhs, i'm guessing that worked out for them.

DVD's gave us random access, computer compatibility, and data-storage possibilities, which VHS did not. You can't watch a videotape on a laptop (without a VCR nearby), and the special features on DVDs don't work on videotapes.

What's the difference between DVDs versus HD or Blu-ray? Size, right? So that means I can either get greater picture resolution (which matters to people with big TVs, but some of us don't go in for that sort of thing) or more movie per disc. It'd be nice to get an entire television season on one disk instead of 5 (I'm guessing the new techs are that big, dunno), but it's hardly the must-have feature, or the seachange that DVDs were.

Ultimately, I think most people will get HD either because the movies they want to see are only in that format, or because the machines they use to play them will only read that format. That's how it will be with me, anyway. Or am I missing some boffo feature about HD?

Re:it would have been way better

[DiamondGeezer]

Batty as he was in the book wouldn't have been that memorable a villain. In the movie, he was one of the most memorable fictional villains ever. A ruthless poetic madman who was getting a crash course in emotions and ethics, and who didn't really understand life until the very end.

That's interesting because Batty isn't a bad guy at all - what changes is our perceptions about who is good and who is bad. We are prejudiced against Batty because of what he was created to do, and all of the other replicants. We think that Deckard is the good guy - except that it was Batty, not Deckard, that showed mercy, love and compassion.

"Aren't you supposed to be the good guy, Deckard?"

In the end, the real monstrosity is mankind, willing to create a slave race of people who think, feel and remember just like we can - and then give them only four years to live and a single dreadful task to perform for that time - and be grateful to their Creator for this?

"I've done...questionable things" says Batty. This isn't a robot, its a thinking sentient being asking "Why am I here? Is this all there is?" But Tyrell couldn't see it. And we can't see it - until its too late.

Blade Runner is one of the greatest movies of all time - a genuine classic whose philosophical themes will be discussed for decades to come - long after trash like Indiana Jones is forgotten.

Re:i love blade runner

[Pope]

The extras and many of the replicants, on the other hand, look like leftovers from a Sex Pistols concert.

Taken a trip to the mall lately? People are *still* dressing like that, and it's not too far til 2019! :)

Re:A.I.

[Abcd1234]

Actually, A.I. *could* have been at least an okay movie, had it not been for the absolutely dreadful "and he lived happily ever after" ending . If they'd just ended the movie with him dying in the ocean, I would've been much more impressed... but no, gotta cap it off with a happy ending!

Re:Special edition DVD?

[Maxo-Texas]

I remember folks instantly recognizing DVD was better- but they were not sure about the cost.

HD & BLU ray are instantly recognizable as worse in terms of DRM and Cost and only marginally better in terms of playback.

You really need a 20' living room and a 60" screen for the difference to matter and even then the difference is more a matter of degree (it's mildly crisper-- but in some cases that exposes flaws and cheesy costuming in the movie that you couldn't see at lower resolutions).

CG vs. models

[Ullteppe]

I think Bladerunner is a prime example that well done model-based SFX actually look better than CGI. Another example is the first Star Wars trilogy. If you look closely at the scenes in Bladerunner, they have a gritty quality, with plenty of film grain on the dark spots. CGI typically doesn't have this. I don't know if this is the primary reason, but the CGI in the newest Star Wars movies just looks too "perfect" and not real. Maybe they need to start reducing the picture quality, like intentionally bring in noise? If you look closely when you are in a dark room, your eyes actually exibit something like ISO noise. This is natural for any light-detecting mechanism, either biological or electronic. But this is lacking in CGI.

Re:[OT] Re:didn't know what a steier .222 looked l

[hazem]

and Jenny Agutter at that! Rowrr. At age 12, that makes an indelible impression. :-)

And at 36 too...

Why is it a good movie?

[Junks Jerzey]

Somehow I never managed to see it until recently. I've seen all the other geek classics, but not Blade Runner, even though I was certainly aware of the movie. And I've read a collection of Philip K. Dick stories, too. So finally watched it Blade Runner last year (the Director's Cut--yeah, I know).

And, wow, was it a waste of my time. It's moody, it has nice special effects, but it's such a flimsy and boring show. I actually kept losing interest and hoping something would happen to move it along. The characters were flat. The ending was generic action movie stuff, but less exciting than most action movies, and I still cared nothing for the characters.

I don't understand the fawning all over this one. Please don't say it's "deep," and I'm too pop-culture. I watch art films all the time. I just don't get what makes this an interesting movie. In 1982, maybe, purely because the effects (think "TRON"), but today?

Re:Maybe I'm too young - I didn't find BR special

[PateraSilk]

> The first Alien seemed too slow. It just dragged on until the Alien popped out.

I think a major problem with Alien for younger viewers is that Alien was so groundbreaking for its day. It was so groundbreaking that it became a cliché. We live in a cinematic world that was changed by Alien and thus its impact is blunted.

Also, pacing has changed remarkably. I was surprised by how long the scenes in the original Exorcist were shot. Jump cuts were unheard-of. Small wonder if movies before 1984 or thereabouts seems slow.

Re:Sweet jesus on a fricken' pogo stick

[Control Group]

If I had mod points, I'd fix the glitch.

You're right: Contact was abominable. That's one of only a few movies I disliked so much I actually want my two hours back.

Re:i love blade runner

[Onan]

Personally, while Blade Runner is a good movie, it seems to me it's just yet another "we built it, and now it goes bad and kills people" movie that we've seen a million times before. Whether it's a replicant in Blade Runner, Skynet in Terminator, or robots in I, Robot, it's all basically the same plot over and over.

I don't think that's a particularly accurate characterization of Blade Runner. While it's true that the big flashy action scenes were replicants killing people, the whole point was that they weren't just mindless or evil killing machines embodying a metaphor for technology gone too far. The point was nearly the opposite of that; they were, fundamentally, human. Humans whose situation and capabilities exceeded their emotional maturity, and who were failing to deal with that in the way that humans are wont to do.

They were in fact the most terrifying of all things: extremely powerful children. Blade Runner has less in common with Terminator than with Lord of the Flies.