Blade Runner

"That was the main area of contention between Ridley and myself at the time. I thought the audience deserved one human being on screen that they could establish an emotional relationship with. I thought I had won Ridley's agreement to that, but in fact I think he had a little reservation about that. I think he really wanted to have it both ways."

"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! [...] It was also obvious that Scott understood the importance of information density to perceptual overload. When Blade Runner works best, it induces a lyrical sort of information sickness, that quintessentially postmodern cocktail of ecstasy and dread. It was what cyberpunk was supposed to be all about"

"The secret of "Blade Runner" is that Scott's fantastically baroque, future-shock imagery, all dark decay and techno-clutter, effectively becomes the story. As the layers of mood and detail settle in, the very process by which we watch the film — scanning those shimmering, claustrophobic frames for signs of life — turns into a running metaphor for what "Blade Runner" is about: a world in which humanity has been snuffed by "progress." This is perhaps the only science-fiction film that can be called transcendental."

"As the movie explored 1980s themes, including genetic engineering and consumerism, it said more with production design than words, detailing a grim, overcrowded future where ornate architecture has been replaced by industrial overload. Harrison Ford, as Deckard, has an apartment so cramped and blocky, he appears to be living in a game of Tetris."

"In 1982, the movie Blade Runner envisaged the then far-off future world of November 2019 as being filled with lifelike androids, neon-drenched cities and ubiquitous flying cars. But November 2019 has arrived, and the future looks very different from the sci-fi noir prediction."

"“Today we use WhatsApp or FaceTime or whatever program you use to make video calls but in the movie they predicted people would go to video-phone booths,” he said. “So although the movie seemed quite advanced at the time and we are yet to get to some of its predictions, in other ways we’ve actually surpassed where the movie thought we would be.”"

"THE view of the future offered by Ridley Scott's muddled yet mesmerizing Blade Runner is as intricately detailed as anything a science-fiction film has yet envisioned. The year is 2019, the place Los Angeles, the landscape garish but bleak. The city is a canyon bounded by industrial towers, some of which belch fire. Advertising billboards, which are everywhere, now feature lifelike electronic people who are the size of giants. The police cruise both horizontally and vertically on their patrol routes, but there is seldom anyone to arrest, because the place is much emptier than it used to be. In an age of space travel, anyone with the wherewithal has presumably gone away. Only the dregs remain."

"At several points in the story, Deckard is called on to wonder whether Rachael has feelings. This seems peculiar, because the icy, poised Rachael, played by Sean Young as a 1940's heroine with spaceage trimmings, seems a lot more expressive than Deckard, who is played by Harrison Ford. Mr. Ford is, for a movie so darkly fanciful, rather a colorless hero; he fades too easily into the bleak background. And he is often upstaged by Rutger Hauer, who in this film and in Night Hawks appears to be specializing in fiendish roles. Mr. Hauer is properly cold-blooded here, but there is something almost humorous behind his nastiness. In any case, he is by far the most animated performer in a film intentionally populated by automatons."

"The end of the film is both gruesome and sentimental. Mr. Scott can't have it both ways, any more than he can expect overdecoration to carry a film that has neither strong characters nor a strong story. That hasn't stopped him from trying, even if it perhaps should have."

"In the context of science fiction, Deckard is the rare existential sci-fi hero. His claims to heroism are not that of a fantasy character like Superman but of an ordinary man confronted with a situation in which he may either escape or be seduced by his environment, and whose testament of courage is that he does not resign himself to the mo-rose life of his contemporaries. Having been nurtured by a pessimistic environment, Deckard manages to rise above the dreariness and corruption of his world and es-cape the suffocating influences of the future Los Angeles, while rescuing the hunted woman he loves Since "Blade Runner" is a study of the individual's emptiness in the face of his society, Deckard succeeds in doing what few characters in Hollywood science fiction have done: He outgrows his futuristic, technologically-awesome world and reestablishes his worth as a human being (or, if you will, a replicant), something which, though not as spectacular as defeating a squadron of invading aliens or slaying a monster, is nonetheless just as triumphant –and, in a dystopian future, something even harder to accomplish."

"It is a starkly empty film, preoccupied as it is with the thought that people themselves might be hollow. The plot depends on the notion that the replicants must be allowed to live no longer than four years, because as time passes they begin to develop raw emotions. Why emotion should be a capital offence is never sufficiently explained; but it is of a piece with the film’s investigation of a flight from feeling – what psychologist Ian D Suttie once named the “taboo on tenderness”. Intimacy here is frightful (everyone appears to live alone), especially that closeness that suggests that the replicants might be indistinguishable from us. This anxiety may originally have had tacit political resonances. In the novel that the film is based on, Philip K Dick’s thoughtful Do Androids Dream of Electric Sheep? (1968), the dilemma of the foot soldier plays out, commanded to kill an adversary considered less human than ourselves, yet troubled by the possibility that the enemy are in fact no different. Shades of Vietnam darken the story, as well as memories of America’s slave-owning past. We are told that the replicants can do everything a human being can do, except feel empathy. Yet how much empathy do we feel for faraway victims or inconvenient others?"

"People tend to classify my movies as cyberpunk fictions but I personally don't think they are. There are some films that I really enjoy such as Blade Runner, and they may have been helpful in shaping my movies to a certain degree. When you create a film dealing with humans and cyborgs, you have no choice but to refer back to Ridley Scott's Blade Runner, as this movie is probably the foundation of movies with this theme. Whether I'm trying to re-appropriate his language or not may not apply to my movies, because my goal is to always make a new movie that nobody has ever seen before. I think I've proven that with Innocence."

"You want an accounting, not a whodunnit but a what-got-dun? Blade Runner got the computerized parking meters right, and the talking streetlights. (“Cross now … cross now … don’t walk … don’t walk.”) Robot Metrokabs? So close. Streetside newsstands carrying an array of glossy magazines? Yeah, about that. Face-recognizing polygraphs? Check your phone’s forward-facing camera. We enhance digital photographs, and we have voice-controlled gadgets in our kitchens. Billionaires promise a life off-world of excitement and adventure, but we don’t even have billboard dirigibles, much less reliable rockets."

"Blade Runner always raised far more questions, literal and cosmological, than it answered, glibly presenting us with a complex and mysterious vision of our future selves, telling us only the scraps we needed to know to follow a plot about a detective who must find and kill the 21st Century equivalent of illegal aliens-so-called replicants, robots so sophisticated they can pass for humans."

"Blade Runner is a big-budget mood piece, an existential tone poem about the precarious nature of humanity and its relationship to the planet, set in one of the most elaborately constructed and imagined futures ever put on film. Watch any of Blade Runner’s street scenes, and it’s immediately apparent how much work went into creating its near-future Los Angeles. Director Ridley Scott’s shots are densely packed, nearly cluttered, with information: old cars outfitted with industrial odds and ends; flying vehicles with blinking monitors; graffiti-covered video payphones; storefronts with blaring neon signs competing for your attention; bands of strangely dressed people carrying umbrellas lit from the handles; video advertising, some of it vaguely menacing, plastered everywhere. Dirt and smog and steam coat everything."

"It’s not just that Harrison Ford looks dashing in neo-noir future wear or that the lighting is always moody and perfect, as if the entire city had been converted into a sultry nightclub — though none of that hurts. It’s that Blade Runner presents its futuristic city as one that is overrun by the liveliness of mass humanity. Its bustling sci-fi cityscape is defined by diversity and walkability, by commerce and cultural mixing, by industrial ingenuity and panoramas of larger-than-life advertising. Even as the city is dying, it teems with the business of life. The combination of realism and romanticism makes the movie’s 2019 Los Angeles a place you can imagine not only going to but wanting to visit."

"With its references to off-world colonies -- where humans get "a chance to begin again in a golden land of opportunity and adventure" -- "Blade Runner" was ahead of its time in introducing the idea that there are consequences to humankind's actions on Earth."

"The key design concept came to be called retrofitting, the idea being that once cities start to seriously break down, no one would bother to start new construction from scratch. Rather, such essentials as electrical and ventilation systems would simply be added onto the exteriors of older buildings, giving them a clunky, somehow menacing look. Progress and decay would exist hand in hand, and the city’s major buildings, like the massive, Mayan-inspired pyramid that houses the Tyrell Corp., would tower miles above the squalor below."

"According to one source, the preview cards filled out after both screenings told the same story: “This was a film that made demands on an audience that wasn’t expecting a movie that made demands on them, an audience somewhat befuddled by the film and very disappointed by the ending.” It wasn’t so much that people actively disliked “Blade Runner,” they were simply unprepared for it. Another crisis had arrived."

"Harrison Ford - Rick Deckard"

"Rutger Hauer - Roy Batty"

"Sean Young - Rachael"

"Edward James Olmos - Gaff"

"M. Emmet Walsh - Bryant"

"Daryl Hannah - Pris"

"William Sanderson - J.F. Sebastian"

"Das Licht, das doppelt so hell brennt, brennt eben nur halb so lang."

"Eine beachtliche Erfahrung, in Furcht leben zu müssen, nicht wahr? So ist es, wenn man ein Sklave ist..."

"Ein Jammer, dass sie nicht leben wird... aber egal – wer tut das schon?"

"Das sind nicht deine Erinnerungen. Sie gehören jemand anders."

"Hauptdarsteller:"

"Erschienen: 1982"

"Genre: Science-Fiction"

"Drehbuch: Philip K. Dick, Hampton Fancher"