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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?"
http://props.steinschneider.com/blade_runner/bldru nbl.htm
What happened to it? I've been waiting for years now. The latest update here seems hopeful, but nothing since.. and it was suggesting a release in time for the 25th anniversary..
Still living with my parents 25 years on
The one thing that did distract from the movie was the extremely obvious wires holding up the spinner in several scenes. That's one "enhancement" I could stand the Special Edition DVD having.
"All this will be lost, like tears in the rain"
"Time to die"
If you don't want to repeat the past, stop living in it.
Oh, shit! Put a spoiler alert above that!
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, but contact comes second in my mind to blade runner
intellectual property law is philosophically incoherent. it is your moral duty to ignore it or sabotage it
...Harrison Ford's holding up pretty damn well.
Oh...what? Damn!
On today's episode of Mythbusters, Jamie and Adam examine the myth that a four-paragraph article should be spread across four pages.
One of the great questions of "Blade Runner" is whether Deckard (Harrison Ford) is, or is not, a replicant himself.
"Knowing" Phillip K. Dick (through reading most of his works) I think personally the answer is a yes, but the debate has raged on for a long time, at least when the subject comes up. Others say no, and that's the greatness of the movie: you can't be completely sure.
Read #14 of the Blade Runner FAQ here and ponder it for yourself.
For...
Ridley Scott and Harrison Ford have stated that Deckard was meant to be a
replicant. In Details magazine (US) October 1992 Ford says:
"Blade Runner was not one of my favorite films. I tangled
with Ridley. The biggest problem was that at the end, he wanted the
audience to find out that Deckard was a replicant. I fought that
because I felt the audience needed somebody to cheer for."
Against...
- Could you trust a replicant to kill other replicants? Why did the police
trust Deckard?
- Having Deckard as a replicant implies a conspiracy between the police and
Tyrell.
And so forth and so on...
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.
In case you haven't seen it yet, the UK Channel 4 documentary On The Edge of Blade Runner.
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.
To do something right, you often have to roll up your sleeves and get busy.
German guy: So, Doctor Jones, boxers or briefs?
Indiana Jones: Depends....
"All great things are simple & expressed in a single word: freedom, justice, honor, duty, mercy, hope." --Churchill
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.
One of the keys to Bladerunner's look was visual density. I recall a quote from one of the set decorators that they had emptied prop houses and junkyards for miles around to get the street scenes ready. When Ridley looked at it he said "That's a good start."
Movies that try to imitate the Bladerunner look fail because they lack the commitment and/or resources to achieve that same visual density. They end up looking like sets.
Alien was like a test run for Bladerunner's set design. The command area is very dense, control panels are studded with screens and controls, as well as personal items, signs that the area is in use and has been for some time.
After seeing Bladerunner in the theater when it first came out all other movies I see will be compared to it, and very few have come close to the strange combination of realism and science fiction, two words that should in a sense be mutually exclusive, but Ridley Scott brought them together better than anyone before or since.
Link to printable version without 4 pages of ads.
First God made idiots. That was for practice. Then He made Jack Thompson.
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.
I enjoyed "Do Androids Dream of Electric Sheep" - but the movie is a different story, only based off of Dick's novel.
The emphasis, as I read it, of Dick's novel was that no matter how real something seems, it is never as good as the real thing. No matter how realistically a replicant could look or act, it would never - ever - really be human.
The movie took the opposite stance. We created the replicants as slaves, but we made them too human - quite possibly "More human than human". Replicants were harsh, violent, and angry - which makes sense considering that they had the emotional experience of a 4 year old. They knew fear - not the reflexive mechanical fear of the book's replicants, but wild animal fear of a human who doesn't want to die. In the book, a replicant that knew it was screwed just gave in - in the movie, they did anything... anything they could... to escape and survive another day. I also don't recall replicants really caring for eachother in the book - whereas in the movie is was a primary driving force. The pictures they kept in the book were mostly to keep up appearances, while in the movie it was a sad attempt at building a past.
Also you have to admit - 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.
The book was good, but I'll take the movie any day - not just for cool factor, but because I feel the movie had far greater literary value (watered down as it was to suit the needs of a 90-minute action movie).
Do not confuse "Freedom of Choice" with "Free Will".
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.
ad logicam Claiming a proposition is false because it was presented as the conclusion of a fallacious argument.
...who will be digitally replaced with Hayden Christensen in the special edition.
Ridley Scott's vision of Los Angeles always seemed amazingly futuristic and innovative to me until I went to live in Taiwan. Los Angeles 2019 = Taibei/Taipei 2002 with more white people. The mix of dirty and ultracool newness is very, very close to what things look like in Taiwan. And if you go across the straits to China, things look even more like Blade Runner.
. Their single-minded devotion to creating the exact prop from the film is a bit eerie, though.
Savage is (or was) a prop guy. That's what they do. I know one who made a working replica of the Logan's Run Blaster just for grins. (Working in that it spews green flames, not in that it terminates runners.)
Oddly, today I happened across some '04 Mayoral candidates that were given the Voight-Kampff test. (The Nexus 7 won.)
One man's -1 Flamebait is another man's +5 Funny.
...who will be digitally replaced with Hayden Christensen in the special edition. This would be a somewhat appropriate excuse to have that shot of Darth Vader yelling "Noooooooooooooo!!!!!!!!!"And its strange English-to-Chinese-to-English subtitle:
"Do Not Want".
"Slashdot - News and Chat Sites Deviant". (Click "homepage" link above for details).
"The movie was stupid. I'll take Jar Jar Binks any day, even, over this crap."
And what would you like for your tenth birthday?
Need Mercedes parts ?
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.
Post may contain irony: discontinue use if experiencing mood swings, nausea or elevated blood pressure.
Sure, I guess way back in the day when Blade Runner came it, it must have been visually exciting to watch. But as a younger person, I only saw it for the first time last year. Personally, I find most of today's modern CGI movies to be the same or more interesting than Blade Runner.
/.'ers feel the same way? The only sci-fi movie that I can think of that I enjoyed from that pre-CGI era was Star Wars and Star Trek 2.
Do other younger
...Decker shot first?You kiddin' me? Decker always shot first.
Any sort of “Special Edition” release is only going to emphasize that point; he had a job to do, and it meant shooting at something. (Coincidentally, it looks/feels/acts human in every way, even down to the blood.)
If this were truly to fall in the footsteps of “Lucas-ized” video releases, then...
*Pray* that I am mistaken about any of these changes coming to pass. <knock, knock>
This post © Copyrite Duggeek, all rights reversed.
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.
Insisting on "correct" English is like saying that there is only one, definitive recipe for chili.
He never was a *man* he was a replicant.
---- Booth was a patriot ----
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.
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.
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Patriotism is a virtue of the vicious
Too bad they didn't try to do the 'gun' in the movie Logan's Run more like the gun in the novel..it was MUCH more interesting, and deadly. Having the homer fired at a runner was a nasty thing....would have made for interesting special effects watching it unravel his entire nervous system.
That was one movie where the book was SO far ahead of it better, that I almost wish the movie hadn't been made.
Light travels faster than sound. This is why some people appear bright until you hear them speak.........
Not meaning to flame, but ... if you're too dense to get it, you can't very well blame the filmmakers.
Breakfast served all day!
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Power Corrupts,Absolute Power Corrupts Absolutely, leaving one person(group)in charge is absolutely corrupt.
Gentlemen, if he is, I think we may have just found the man who keeps giving Keanu Reeves new roles.
SJW: Someone who has run out of real oppression, and has to fake it.
Actually, Vancouver is in the southwest of Canada. It's not really in the northwest of anything.
This was expained in one of the Han Solo Trilogy books, about a young Solo working his way up the Hutt Syndicate.
The Kessel Run is close to the Maw, a collection of black holes, that is between Kessel, a prison/spice production planet, and Nar Shadda, the smugglers moon orbiting the Hutt homeworld. Because of the gravitational pull of the Maw, smuggler ships that pass between Kessel and Nar Shadda have to skirt around the black holes to avoid the event horizons (even if it would take infinitely long to fall in). Faster ships can run closer, shortening their time and distance.
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.
Tubby or not tubby. Fat is the question
Hi. Thanks for your post; it brought back some memories from my youth. I agree, the book had a lot of stuff that would've been cool to see in the movie (and not just more of the gun). But from my memory of the book, a lot of it probably would've given the movie an "R" rating. Frankly, I'm a little surprised that it was only PG as it was. But things were different back in '76.
:-)
I still enjoy watching the movie to this day, though. Perhaps this is because it holds a special place in my heart... it was the first movie in which I ever saw a fully naked woman... and I mean fully!... and Jenny Agutter at that! Rowrr. At age 12, that makes an indelible impression.
Take it easy.
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!
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.
There was a PBS documentary on the other day (the name of which unfortunately escapes me) about the production design of various classic films. Apparently one of the reasons the street scenes in Blade Runner were so incredibly detailed is that during the early stages of filming, the screen actors guild in L.A. went on strike for 8 weeks or so. The only folks still able to come into work and that had anything to do with no actors around were the set-building crew and production designers, and left to their own devices they went nuts. Apparently "Ridleyville" (as the main street set was jokingly referred to) ended up one of the most intricately detailed in movie history by the time the actors came back to restart shooting.
and Jenny Agutter at that! Rowrr. At age 12, that makes an indelible impression. :-)
And at 36 too...
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?
Mods like Contact? WTF? Are you ALL on crack? IT SUCKED ASS! It wasn't just bad, it was dreadful. The kind of people that liked it are the kind of Sci-Fi dilettantes that liked The Matrix or Cocoon. Posers.
Waste your damn mod points modding this troll, it's my honest opinion. I don't give a rat's ass what someone dumb enough to like Contact thinks anyway.
- None can love freedom heartily, but good men; the rest love not freedom, but license. -- John Milton
This is where that love-it/hate-it thing comes in, I guess...
(First off, I know you didn't say this, but it'll inevitably come up--those aren't aliens, damnit! They're advanced mecha. One of them is even the narrator; the movie starts with him/it saying "Those were the days when..." It's unfortunate that so many people never realized this, but on the other hand it clicks if you watch it a second time and then you get a lot more out of it.)
Many people have called the movie a fairy tale, and they'd be right to do so. But you can take that even further; it's a fairy tale that advanced mecha tell each other, long after humans have gone extinct. What parts of the last half-hour were real, if any? When he went back to his house that seemed both real and eerily artificial, the visuals suggested to me that it was all a vision in his head. They read his mind anyways; they might as well have been feeding him these images, even as he was really still half-frozen at the bottom of the ice excavation. The time-space continuum excuse especially sounded like a fabricated lie... Was it inevitable that David would be woken up by *something* someday, simply because he was not mortal? Perhaps there are thousands of discarded robots like him, buried inside the frozen Earth. The advanced mechas eventually dig out and feed a similar story to each that finally satisfies and terminate its program. Is this compassion between robots? Why do they do it? Are they trying to make robots dream, or are they saying that death is just another dream?
The movie asked a lot of questions about what it means to be human--similar to BR, but focused on love. I remember a particular review of A.I. (it had quite good reviews) that summed it up quite well and it seems to me the message of the movie: "To be real is to be mortal; to be human is to love, to dream and to perish." Perhaps that's why the advanced mechas gave him the choice. Hmm...
Anyways, personally I found that the ending was incredibly sad and not a happy one at all. I disagree that it would have been at all satisfying for the movie to just end on the ocean's floor, and for David to truly never "die." But you could take it either way, and stuff like this is why I found it so fascinating. And then of course there was the (first "mature") Alternate Reality Game/viral marketing that was really neat in itself. Ultimately, of course, it's up to your own experience.
Blade Runner with the voice over was my all time favorite movie, until the Director's Cut came out. There is nothing in the voice over that you can't learn by observing the movie, so it is extra, superfluous, repetitive, AND redundant. If you want insight into Deckard's mind, Gaff's origami figures speak volumes.
What so many people can't seem to get is that movies AREN'T TV. You don't need to fill every second with dialog. Movies work better when the story is told visually. Voice overs can work but usually they are used to make up for poor directing. Just like flash-backs are often used to cover up for poor script writing.
-- QED
Hell, let me quote William Gibson, "About ten minutes into Blade Runner, I reeled out of the theater in complete despair over its visual brilliance and its similarity to the "look" of Neuromancer, my [then] largely unwritten first novel. Not only had I been beaten to the semiotic punch, but this damned movie looked better than the images in my head! With time, as I got over that, I started to take a certain delight in the way the film began to affect the way the world looked. Club fashions, at first, then rock videos, finally even architecture. Amazing! A science fiction movie affecting reality!" Bad set design? hmm.