Blade Runner
(Director's Cut)
Blade Runner has the sense of being a very cool
film. Arguably, the term Blade Runner itself is cool (imagine that was your job
title) and the fact that this version is a so-called "Director's Cut"
adds extra coolness, if that's possible, to the whole endeavour. It's something
of a cult film too - at least insofar as its core audience is probably sci-fi
heads and others of the Genus Technophilus, because its big-budget,
big-name stars, and mass distribution might suggest something different.
The stars in question are most notably,
speaking from a 2009 perspective, (the action is set in 2019, isn't that cool?)
Harrison Ford and Daryl Hannah. The former plays the Blade Runner, called Deckard.
In the lexicon of the film, a Blade Runner is someone who, using the euphemism
of the text, "retires" troublesome robots. Here, Hannah plays one of
those, a "basic pleasure model" (nudge, nudge) who, along with some
of her robot buddies – some of whom were developed as highly proficient
soldiers – is evincing human-like aspirations, a worry for their creators', chief
among whom is a desire to "live" that little bit longer.
We learn all this early in the proceedings. Apparently
out of the game when we meet him, Deckard's reluctantly convinced – it
doesn't take long to convince him because the director is keen to show lots of stunning
images of “cars” flying between skyscrapers and the like – to get back into, to
coin a phrase, "Bladerunning", by a police boss (played by M. Emmet
Walsh). Retiring robots is like riding a bike, it seems, because Deckard is
quickly on their trail, thanks to the help of some really cool (there's that
word again) technology that's probably been around for ages by 2019,
given its voice-operated user-friendliness, and the facility with which he uses
it, but which may, outside this fictional world, be impossible.
So here we have another movie about the ghost
in the machine. One may wonder what it is that's so fascinating about the idea
of a “robot's” soul, from, among others, the story of Prometheus' clay figures, mankind, in the ancient Greek mythology, to the Tin
Man in The Wizard of Oz, via Frankenstein? Perhaps these stories stir
the xenophobia that we are led to believe is "hard-wired" into our
brains, even though we also sympathise with these characters and their struggle,
thus creating the mixture of vicarious fear and exhiliration that is perfect
for a cinematic experience. What could be more challenging to our fear of the
unknown than entities without any roots at all? Entities, such as in Blade Runner, that resemble us and appear
to share our outlook, more or less, but that have been "beamed down",
so to speak, and therefore lack the however many aeons of lineage and heritage that
each human shares by default. Deckard's targets for retirement are thus the
outsider's outsider and so are the perfect subjects for what, despite the “big
questions” in the background (and the doubt about whether this might be a case
of poacher turned gamekeeper), is ultimately a teen flick, albeit a pretty cool
one.