TIME: Almanac 1990/1990 Time Magazine Compact Almanac, The (1991)(Time).iso/time/caps/82/82blade

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Blade Runner:  The Pleasures of Texture

July 12, 1982

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