Blade Runner with Michael Phillips | Archive

0:21Speaker 1:Filmspotting is presented by Regal Unlimited, the all-you-can-watch movie subscription pass that pays for itself in just two visits. See any standard 2D movie anytime with no blackout dates or restrictions. Sign up now on the Regal app or at the link in our description and use code FILMSPOT26 to receive 15% off.

0:45Speaker 2:What kind of a show are you guys putting on here today?

0:48Speaker 3:You're not interested in art? No.

0:50Speaker 2:Well, look, we're going to do this thing. We're going to have a conversation.

0:55Speaker 4:It is Archive Drop Wednesday. Ridley Scott has a new movie coming out, Josh. The Dog stars in theaters. And this is a post-apocalyptic tale with Jacob Elordi, Josh Brolin, Margaret Qualley. Sounds a little dystopian, whether it's dystopian or not. We're thinking Ridley Scott. Why not dip into the archive and pull out something from that filmmaker? And we've got Blade Runner 2017. We did a Sacred Cow review of that film. We also have coming up, and I know we're both doing a little bit of homework, a Ridley Scott draft.

1:35Speaker 2:That's right.

1:35Speaker 4:I don't want to divulge anything about our draft strategies, but don't you think Blade Runner is a pretty obvious number two pick in that draft?

1:45Speaker 1:Probably. I'm assuming you're assuming alien goes first. I am.

1:50Speaker 5:And, um, but Roxanne is a wild card.

1:53Speaker 1:I know. I was just going to say, we are going to have a guest with us, Roxanna Haddadi from vulture. And what's fun about doing guests is we're not always quite certain of what their particular taste is, especially when it comes to a filmmaker's entire career. So yeah, depending on where she lands in the order. And if she has an idiosyncratic pick that could throw things for a loop, I tend to think at least between the two of us, yeah, Blade Runner, Alien 1 and 2. But we'll see what happens.

2:24Speaker 5:We will.

2:24Speaker 4:And from September 2017, here is our Sacred Cow review of Blade Runner.

2:30Speaker 3:They jumped the shuttle off-world, killed the crew and passengers. They found the shuttle drifting off the coast two weeks ago, so.

2:36Speaker 6:We know they're around.

2:39Speaker 2:Embarrassing.

2:41Speaker 3:No, sir, not embarrassing, because no one's ever going to find out they're down here. Because you're going to spot them, and you're going to air them out.

2:47Speaker 2:I don't work here anymore. Give it to Holden. He's good.

2:52Speaker 3:I did. He can breathe okay, as long as nobody unplugs him.

2:56Speaker 6:The film Blade Runner survives in several different versions, and point-by-point, replicant-by-replicant comparisons between the eight cuts, most of which are actually available today, they've fueled many a Comic-Con conversation today. and countless film nerd arguments since the first version was released to mainstream bafflement and disappointing box office figures back in June 1982, when I was 21 years old. That same day in June, John Carpenter's remake of The Thing came out, too, and both those films have grown in stature over the years. That's kind of an obvious point, but it's true, and you can find plenty of fans who would pick either The Thing or Blade Runner, very different brands of science fiction, as their number one film of that year, 1982, whether they were born then or not.

3:40Speaker 6:Blade Runner comes from the Philip K. Dick story, Do Androids Dream of Electric Sheep? And even those who didn't care much about the film version, directed by Ridley Scott, they had to acknowledge the density and fascination of the visual quality of the film, the production design, the effects, and the overall atmosphere. This was Los Angeles in the year 2019. Perpetual rain falling, miserable crowding, huge looming video billboards that, well, actually did come to pass more or less by 2017. more so than the flying cars. Blade Runner Deckard, played by Harrison Ford, who may or may not be a replicant himself, depending on the version of the film you're watching, chases down four rogue replicants targeted for elimination, but he meets a formidable match in Rutger Hauer's uber-mensch of a lemon-haired god. So, when I saw the film at 21, guys, you weren't even born yet, I know, I came out wildly conflicted, but was very eager to see it a second time very soon, to really see it, see all of it, or at least more of it. Two questions I have for you. One, did Blade Runner flop back in 82 because George Lucas

4:44Speaker 6:had reoriented the mass audience's taste for retro futuristic science fiction so radically five years earlier with Star Wars? And two, is Blade Runner a movie for you today that was simply ahead of its time and now seems very much what Ridley Scott intended it to be, an L.A. story with legs longer than Joanna Cassidy's? So I wanted to end on that sleazy note.

5:06Speaker 5:Thank you.

5:07Speaker 1:Appreciate that. I think you're right why Blade Runner was probably initially rejected. You put this side by side with something like Star Wars and it's absolutely a different experience. Contemplative. I was relieved, though, that it wasn't overbearing in that way. My memory of it, having seen probably the original theatrical release later in the 80s, I would have come across it, is what I initially watched. And my memory was that it was more ponderous more existential on the surface in the way, oh, I don't know, Prometheus is now or even Alien Covenant a little bit.

5:40Speaker 5:Covering similar ground.

5:41Speaker 1:Yes, it is.

5:43Speaker 6:You're actually promulgating the auteur theory.

5:45Speaker 1:Well, but I think that in comparison to those films in particular, it wears those elements lightly. In comparison to Star Wars, it wears them heavily. So that's probably a reason. I really did enjoy it this time. For the record, watched the final cut. looked amazing. The Blu-ray. I mean, the first thing we need to say, and you touched on it, Michael, is the visual aesthetic of this film. This thing could have been made yesterday, especially if you're watching it on a decent screen on Blu-ray. It just holds up absolutely from the flying cars to the, here's the world building detail that jumped out at me this time.

6:22Speaker 1:That's just a small thing, but you multiply this, you know, 50 times and you get a full world The handles of the umbrellas, how they glow, fluorescent. And you add enough of those and you get this parade of bobbing, glowing sticks down the street. It's just something like that in terms of prop design, production design that really fills out this world. And I think that's why the movie has been so influential and has lingered because it set that vision for so many people.

6:51Speaker 3:Mm-hmm.

6:51Speaker 1:And I think also because it's the definitive sci-noir. I mean, this is a merging of those two genres, science fiction and film noir. I think, and maybe we can get into this, that's absolutely the movie's strength in some ways. But it's also, there are areas to this where if you're holding it up as a film noir, it does fall a teeny bit short for me. But absolutely love this revisit. Spoiler, it makes my top five films of 1982. Now the big question that's going to be harder for me is, do I prefer this or Ridley Scott's Alien?

7:22Speaker 1:Because I think that's one we've... bandied about on the show here, Adam, and have always said, well, it would really take a revisit of Blade Runner to answer that.

7:29Speaker 2:Yeah.

7:29Speaker 1:Now we kind of have to, and I don't have an answer right now. I don't either. Excellent films.

7:32Speaker 6:I think you've hit on another reason why the mainstream audience back in 82 was just sort of perplexed and a little bit turned off by Blade Runner because they had just, you know, the last thing they remember with that and that brand name on it, Ridley Scott, was Alien, which really, you know, grabbed people by the throat.

7:49Speaker 1:Much more pure genre. Absolutely. And, yeah, the Cy Noir.

7:53Speaker 6:Handle, I like that. And really only Spielberg's Minority Report would sort of compete maybe with more recent work in that same genre.

7:59Speaker 3:Yeah.

8:00Speaker 4:No, I want to echo a lot of what you said there, Josh, including the stuff about its noir influence. But first, the cinematography, Jordan Cronenweth, we'll talk about that a little bit, the art direction. Yeah, the visual look of the film is still incredibly stunning and fascinating. I'm thinking of this too a little bit, not just in the context of something like Star Wars, but we did a while back here on the show, a 70s sci-fi marathon. And we covered a lot of movies that were made in the early part of that decade that are kind of silly now, though I wouldn't say The Andromeda Strain is necessarily silly. And I like that movie, but Maybe something like Silent Running looks pretty quaint and cheesy from the 2017 perspective. But some of the stuff made in the mid to later part of that decade, too, Logan's Run, they feel way more than five or six years apart.

8:47Speaker 4:They feel generations apart from a filmmaking standpoint. And it's almost as if this future dystopia had really never existed before Blade Runner. I feel like it has been the influence for every film that has followed it. And one of the things that really stood out to me was the sense watching it that it's terrifying. It does feel like a dystopia very much at times in terms of the overcrowding. We are clued into the fact that if you want to get away, and most people do, they go off world, right? That these are kind of the nobodies.

9:20Speaker 4:And even the detective or the cop Bryant at one point says that to him, if you're not a cop, you're one.

9:24Speaker 5:Of the little people.

9:25Speaker 4:Well, this is a world full of little people of leave behinds who really have So it's a scary place at times and terrifying, but it's also just because of the look of it, exciting and alluring and somehow inviting, like you almost want to go and experience this version of Los Angeles.

9:52Speaker 6:A few years earlier, you can believe in what you're watching. Because the film takes place at night and it's raining and it's got the right texture and background, the kind of effects that Scott was working with and his team, they're pulled off. You don't see any of the usual blues lines around. A little bit here and there, but it just has a believability. Now, does it connect? Does it satisfy on story terms? That's what, you know, back in 82 audiences were kind of like, it's not an untrackable plot. It's a very simple plot. It's simply, okay, you know, one relatably, you know, kind of worn down private eye type figure, you know, in this case a Blade Runner, has to chase down one by one these targets, these replicants. the film's got a very kind of vignette structure and that's unusual, you know, especially coming off year before you had the second Star Wars film, Empire Strikes Back, you know, of course the main Star Wars film, 77, you know, that kind of pacing for the time was just pure Atari, right? You know, like fast and you didn't get a sense of like even segments or big scenes.

11:00Speaker 6:It was just all one ride, right? Blade Runner, very different. And I think Josh, even if you didn't experience it as ponderous or, At the time, I think it was disorienting.

11:13Speaker 2:Sure.

11:13Speaker 1:And as far as the story beats go, you can even sense in the final cut, which is Scott's preferred version, that things are still being a bit patched together in terms of Ford's identity, Deckard's identity, his relationship with the Sean Young character. And even here, there's the one glimpse of the unicorn, right? The one dream sequence.

11:35Speaker 4:Yeah.

11:36Speaker 1:You somewhat know how to fit that in if you have familiarity with the lore about all these other versions, but seeing that just on its own, it's a little, it stands out. So you can tell that there are pieces trying to be forced together here narratively, and I think that does provide a little bit of a hiccup. But again, it's more of a mood that this movie is managing to evoke. It's that fatalism from film noir that it really latches onto and makes us feel. Of course, you have things like, we've mentioned the floating billboard that has spotlights that are constantly streaming through all the windows, and all the windows have Venetian blinds, right? In 2019, Los Angeles. So you get this noir sense. You get Harrison Ford, you know, I was a little disappointed him being a hero of my youth from all these other films.

12:23Speaker 1:You know, Indiana Jones and Han Solo. Here he's just a harder drinking. Indiana Jones, a little crabbier, otherwise tries to float by on the same charisma. He's no Sam Spade, in other words.

12:34Speaker 5:He's so disaffected.

12:36Speaker 1:He's fine, but you could tell he's working against that. charm that he brought to those other parts purposefully. You can see why he was drawn to this. I'm going to make my anti-Star Wars in a way, but I think that still makes for a somewhat less interesting character. The movie, really for me, belongs to Rutger Hauer. And this is where the fatalism comes in. This is where this movie becomes about mortality. And the replicants just stand in for us. They have this four-year lifespan and Roy Batty The way he has a dreaminess, he's in wonder at the world, even as he despises his corporate creators who have given him this four-year lifespan. And the way Howard balances... I.

13:19Speaker 6:Should say that's how it works at the Trib, too. It's just a four-year renewal.

13:24Speaker 1:I was going to say, you've been renewed a few times. A couple of times. Not yet retired, thank goodness. The way Howard balances those two things, though, where there's this poet inside him, inside this assassin... and he recognizes his mortality, and the way that reflects on all of us gives Blade Runner, despite any plot confusion, this heavy sort of noir fatalism that I think sticks with you.

13:49Speaker 6:Yeah, I might argue with you on that. I think that, to me, that is where the eye-rolling I do experience, and I know this is sacrilege for the Blade Runner fans, and I am a fan. I mean, I saw it twice back then, and I've certainly seen it twice or three times since.

14:05Speaker 4:But.

14:06Speaker 1:Tears and Rain doesn't work for you?

14:08Speaker 6:Well, I, you know, I do enough of my own. I don't need to, but I think other things about that movie, you know, really do point to everything Ridley Scott explored over and over with, you know, the alien sort of world of the more recent films. He loves this idea of, you know, life as it is lived or imagined by non-human, you know, creations. And it's a great theme, you know, and it gets right to the kind of, You know, everything from, you know, there's a lot of movies and novels right next door to this idea.

14:39Speaker 6:And I think it's the point of this movie. But there is something a little dead about the Harrison Ford character. He's reactive.

14:47Speaker 1:He's sullen.

14:48Speaker 6:There's no heroics. You know, all that and all this Harrison Ford knew going in. He wasn't yet an interesting enough actor to play two notes at once within that range.

14:58Speaker 1:Yeah, he's coasting on his charisma here a little bit.

15:01Speaker 2:Remember when you were six? You and your brother snuck into an empty building through a basement window. You were going to play doctor. He showed you his. When it got to be your turn, you chickened and ran.

15:14Speaker 3:Remember that?

15:18Speaker 2:You ever tell anybody that? Your mother, Tyrell, anybody?

15:23Speaker 4:I am a big fan of the villain performances here. I would include actually even Pris, Daryl Hannah in.

15:28Speaker 1:The mix here. That's a really good scene.

15:30Speaker 4:I think William Sanderson is the actor who plays J.F. Sebastian, who sees them. And when he sees Roy Batty come in, he knows for sure, if he didn't know already, that both of them are replicants. And he says, you're just so perfect.

15:41Speaker 1:And they are.

15:42Speaker 4:There's something about them that instantly suggests that. But I'm with you, Josh, in terms of loving them. the Howard character and performance, and I love that he is this character. He's built up as a bad guy. Bryant calls him the worst, and he's a menacing figure, and we are supposed to be afraid of him a little bit, I think, but he gets scared, which we don't see a lot from villains in these types of sci-fi movies. He gets emotional, and I do think that end soliloquy is still, for me, one of the most tragic and moving soliloquies in all of cinema. This idea of that he's lamenting memories and locations and visions that.

16:17Speaker 5:Are completely made up.

16:19Speaker 4:They are meaningless to any human being listening to what he's describing. And yet the way he does it, the fact that he is so poetic about it and so evocative in his delivery, it makes it such a lament that you feel the power of that.

16:32Speaker 5:So I do love that performance.

16:34Speaker 4:And look, what I responded to when I saw this movie for the first time, and honestly, the last time, it was back in college.

16:40Speaker 5:It was over 20 years ago I saw this film.

16:42Speaker 4:But that question, of course, that typical sort of cliche, if you will, sci-fi question, what ultimately makes us human? And of course, the movie suggests that beyond emotions, beyond a capacity for imagination, maybe it is memories. And beyond memories, it's this instinct for survival, the desire for survival. To live, to go beyond your life expectancy, however you pull that off. And so we get into that similar ground to some of the Alien movies with Scott, where he loves the idea of meeting your maker, confronting your maker, and asking for more life or demanding more life, which is something I think we would all probably do if we could.

17:19Speaker 4:It is a fundamentally human quest. One of the things I missed, though, that really stuck out to me this time watching it that fits in with all of this is the end of the film, that showdown between Batty and Deckard. I always saw as Batty just kind of toying with Deckard, maybe ultimately having sympathy for him. He spares him, of course, but toying with him, but just kind of prolonging their confrontation that he is ultimately going to take him down, whether he changes his mind or not is something we can discuss. But I thought maybe, OK, he has a cruel streak in him and he's going to take it out on Deckard, who has killed his friends, the other replicants. And then what I really tapped into this time is the way Scott emphasizes Deckard's struggle to survive, really keying in on the lengths he goes to in order to survive, climbing through those holes, climbing up on that bureau, whatever it is, going through the ceiling, going out on that ledge, the way he's hanging on for dear life, literally, and his fingers are about to fall.

18:21Speaker 4:And we are constantly seeing that from Batty's perspective, too. I think in a lot of ways, It's a more intense and shortened version of the entire struggle of Batty and his replicants since they had their mutiny and escaped. It's basically I think what he sees in him in that moment is that same desire to live, that same desire to survive that he himself feels. And so ultimately then sees a certain kinship with him.

18:47Speaker 1:And there's a vulnerability there, too. So this is what Ford does have, and this is what he had from the start. It's the same thing that Bruce Willis tapped into that made him an iconic action hero was vulnerability. This guy could get hurt. He wasn't like Stallone or he wasn't like Schwarzenegger in this way. And we see that in Ford's performance here. I think it works really well. And I think what's so moving about that climactic showdown is is that Batty just succumbs to his own exhaustion and weariness and maybe realizes the futility of this human emotion he's experiencing, revenge. Does that make him human, that he now wants to pursue vengeance for Deckard killing the other replicants? I don't know, maybe. And the speech itself works for me because it's almost as if Batty had been programmed for Shakespeare. It's that dramatically given, right? That's why we remember it. It's very melodramatic. He's theatrical. He's theatrical.

19:41Speaker 1:He makes entrances. Underneath that, you can sense that there's something also deeply felt about what he's saying that Hauer is also bringing to the performance. And I think that's where the connection is made, where then we start to realize, OK, this whole movie is about our own mortality, whether we're replicants or not. Maybe that's where it has a leg up on, I can see what you're saying, Michael, alien behavior. You could say Alien did this. Well, it's a totally different, it's a different kind of thing. Right, but in terms of the artificially intelligent figure, you could say, well, Alien did this with one side character. you know in ash everything that Blade Runner is doing alien did kind of off to the side to a degree I see that but I think there's something larger and more universal about this sense of mortality that we're experiencing in Blade Runner that we don't maybe get In the character of Ash.

20:27Speaker 6:Now, does it matter to you guys, the key question that everybody keeps coming back to is Deckard.

20:33Speaker 5:So I want to talk about that for sure.

20:34Speaker 4:I don't know if I'm ready to get there yet, but I think we should close with that for sure. I want to go back to something you both brought up in terms of the narrative and how successful or unsuccessful it is, because one of the co-screenwriters here, David Peoples, I saw a comment from him where he said, I think fairly recently, that if you're talking about Ridley Scott and you have to choose visuals over narrative, and I'm paraphrasing here, he says, you always go with visuals, but damn, I wish it had a better narrative, people said. So basically commenting on his own material that Scott envisioned on screen.

21:04Speaker 1:This is, I think, a limitation of the film.

21:06Speaker 5:So you guys touch on this a little bit.

21:07Speaker 4:I wondered if there were any more specifics about what specifically with the story didn't work. What I would single out does go back to what you were talking about, Josh, in terms of the Sean Young character. And I love her performance. And of course, part of what I love about her performance is the way Cronenweth lights her. And the fact that every time she walks into a room and the way she walks in and out of shadows, you are just mesmerized by her. And it is down to her movement itself is also fascinating. But, oh, that sex scene.

21:36Speaker 2:Will you kiss me?

21:40Speaker 1:I can't rely on you.

21:42Speaker 2:Say you kiss me.

21:48Speaker 4:The ramifications of it, everything that would go with this character Deckard, who we can talk about the replicant part of this later, but a human we perceive him to be, we believe he perceives himself to be, about to engage in this act with a replicant. The movie takes no time to really think about any of the consequences of that whatsoever. And I think that the whole thing is so bizarre that There is a noir inevitability from the moment she walks in. She's a mall and they seem to be drawn to each other in some way. I'll give the movie that. But when it happens, it still feels like the movie hasn't completely earned that relationship between them.

22:27Speaker 4:And I think you can even point to something like the fact that she plays a major role in the plot when she saves his life. pulling out a gun randomly on the street and killing a replicant who's trying to kill Harrison Ford. Where does that come from other than it's serving a plot need?

22:42Speaker 3:Right, right.

22:42Speaker 1:I think that's absolutely true. And I also think here's where the noir comparisons don't do the movie any favors because a strength of all the classic film noirs is the femme fatale. And Young, I wouldn't, you know, I don't think it's that arresting of a performance, but I think that's because of the script, Adam, not because of anything Young is doing. Certainly she is lit in that way. They set her up to be that femme fatale, but they have not written her that way. The scene you talked about, the sex scene, rape scene almost is how it plays now. I mean, it's really disturbing when you watch the scene through today's eyes, maybe that 1982 audiences might not have. But I think it's also just troubling because the character is never fully developed and it's a crucial character, right? Rachel should be the linchpin between the replicant world and the human world, and she's not given enough narrative support.

23:33Speaker 5:To make that work. I think she captures that otherworldliness.

23:36Speaker 6:I would argue with, I think both those performances, it's not that they were spring chickens. I mean, they had, you know, they had done some work by then, Ford and Young, but I think those performances are not quite what they could be, even given that script. I think I think craftier, wittier performers, not necessarily playing for laughs or anything. God knows that film can only accommodate so much levity at all. But I think craftier performers would play that guessing game a little more about how human or how replicant we really are in different degrees with these two characters. But I think, again, I get the sense of kind of one note hit hard. I don't know if Ridley Scott's even really an actor's.

24:22Speaker 2:Director, frankly.

24:23Speaker 6:And I think Young, you know, I think he could get 100 actresses in Hollywood who probably would have pulled it off more so than Young. Yeah, medium talent at best, I think. Now, Ford, obviously, better than that on his high end. He wasn't there yet with this. And I think that's a limitation of the film. I think also just the storytelling rhythm, even if it's a simple going to do this, going to do this, going to do this, and then I'm going to, you know, meet my Waterloo maybe at the end. That's a very methodical, segmented... vignette-oriented kind of structure. And I think that's probably why the screenwriter, David Peeples, the co-writer, was a little frustrated because it just.

24:59Speaker 1:Is what it is.

24:59Speaker 6:It's not much, you know. And you get all this setup. And one of my favorite scenes is the one with Joanna Cassidy as the snake handler, you know, in the window. And then she's, you know, that's a performer who is completely alive. I mean, she's a great actress anyway, and I wish she had gotten the role she deserved, you know, in her heyday. But that, you know, obviously that replicant's life story is over five minutes later. after this sort of, like, Baroque-ly sadistic series of, you know, running through the plate glass windows, which is like, that was, even in the history of plate glass being smashed on film, that was a ton of plate glass.

25:33Speaker 1:It was.

25:34Speaker 6:And it's a bit, that's, to me, that moment is kind of, it's perfect, it's a perfect, you know, emblem of what Ridley Scott's up to. It's gorgeous, it's unsettling, and it might be a tiny bit much. Yeah. And that's Ridley Scott, you know, whether you love him or not.

25:51Speaker 4:I have to say I did get really caught up in that question of whether or not Deckard is a replicant. And one of my questions to you guys is why does it matter really? Why is it that some people refuse at this point to accept it? What is it about the film or those characters or us as movie watchers that want to cling to some notion that he isn't? But before we get there, let's go ahead and try to answer the question. Because like I said, it is something that I've been thinking about since I finished the film.

26:19Speaker 5:Where do you guys come out?

26:20Speaker 1:Well, I'd have to separate, what would you say if you had just watched, say, the final cut? I mean, is there enough there that we'd even be asking the question? I think that one sequence of the unicorn is maybe the biggest hint, especially after we've learned that memories have been implanted. He seems confused at where that has come from.

26:38Speaker 3:Yeah.

26:38Speaker 1:And that may be just enough for you to say, oh, okay, in addition to the Rachel character, who has already been someone who's deluded to think they're real. So maybe you could surmise it, but honestly... just having watched the final cut, I think it's just a tantalizing possibility.

26:53Speaker 4:Well, I did want to scan to this scene before I sat down here and I failed to do so in the original theatrical cut, but I think there's one other giveaway even before the unicorn. I think there are some other hints and clues potentially along the way. And yes, I only watched the final cut this time, but there is a hint that Ridley Scott puts in there that I assume is in the theatrical version originally, which is a question, she openly brings it up, right? She raises it to him in his apartment. She says, have you taken the test? Are you sure you want to? So it puts that in our minds, at least as viewers.

27:28Speaker 4:He doesn't hear it because he falls asleep. I think there are some other things that you could cling to if you were looking for the support. The way Bryant refers to him as a one-man slaughterhouse, the fact that he does seem to have such a non-life, almost like a replicant might, and he seems almost like he was programmed to do this job and do only that job. And he doesn't have the sense of empathy. There's a vulnerability and an emotion to someone like Roy Batty, but he has no problem hurting anyone along the way to get to what he ultimately wants. Deckard is very much the same way. I was even thinking about some of the dialogue where there is that line I reference where Bryant says about Batty, there is a bad one.

28:07Speaker 5:He's the worst.

28:08Speaker 4:He says to Deckard later, aren't you the good one? And it makes me think almost, I wonder if it's playing with the idea, whether Batty knows something Or Ridley Scott, again, is just sort of toying with us the idea that, well, he's the he's the good replicant who's serving the people. So anyway, that's there. There is a clue, I think, in the photographs on his piano. Remember, we see that. And we do learn earlier that the replicants, they they love those photos. They cling to those. They're given to they're given those as as memories of a supposed real past.

28:39Speaker 5:So that's all there. And then we, of course, get to the unicorn.

28:42Speaker 4:And I want to talk about that and the origami leave behind, Edward James Olmos, right, at the end of the film. That would seem to be pretty strong evidence, right, that this must be a case where he's a replicant because it is referencing his daydream, as you said, the unicorn earlier, which ties back to Rachel and the clip we heard and Harrison Ford informing her, no, you're really a replicant because that might have been Tyrell's nieces. Those were implanted in you. And it's as if Gaff, the Edward James Olmos character, is saying, I've read your file just like you read hers. That was just an implant, that unicorn. That's why he made a unicorn there. So that would seem to clinch it, right? That he must be a replicant or that Ridley Scott is absolutely trying to say.

29:27Speaker 1:That he is. But is the movie better for it?

29:29Speaker 5:No, I don't know. So we'll get there.

29:31Speaker 4:Let me just finish my spiel here on whether or not he is. Because you can counter that and say in the original version, we don't get the unicorn daydream, right? we do get the origami figure at the end. And all it conveys is nothing more than Gaff basically showing I was there. I could have killed her and I didn't. And that's how we all saw the first version of this film. And that was enough.

29:53Speaker 1:Or I'm on your tail.

29:55Speaker 5:Or that too.

29:56Speaker 4:I certainly read it as he was here. He had his chance to take her down. He's letting them get away. Deckard seems to realize that. And he kind of reacts nonchalantly. It's not as if Deckard reacts to that as if he's been stunned by some existential realization that he's a replicant. He sort of turns and with some urgency heads out the door with her. So this is all leading to the fact that I think the more emphatic giveaway is that goldish red glow that only the replicants have in their eyes. If you watch the whole film, only the artificial figures have that glow in their eyes. And damn it, Deckard has it in the scene back at the apartment where he's standing right next to her, kind of behind her, behind her shoulder. And she has it in her eyes and he has it in her eyes. And why would that be there?

30:40Speaker 1:Adam, that's the look of love.

30:42Speaker 5:I mean, it does beg the question, why do we only see it that once?

30:46Speaker 4:Hmm.

30:46Speaker 5:In him. But why would he have that if he wasn't artificial?

30:49Speaker 1:Right. And it does come and go for her as well, I believe.

30:51Speaker 5:Yeah, it's not there all the time.

30:53Speaker 6:Nobody questions whether or not Sean Young is a replicant at all.

30:56Speaker 5:They don't. You know it right away.

30:58Speaker 6:Do you like my owl?

30:59Speaker 1:I mean, that's not a human. That's not human. That's not human banter.

31:02Speaker 4:I guess I would at least say this, and we should throw out there that Ridley Scott has been pretty clear now recently in saying, Yeah, he's a replicant. I mean, if you're not agreeing with that, you're kind of an idiot. But I would argue that, OK, I think he's a replicant, meaning Scott thinks that's the most satisfying interpretation. And he's now basically made it impossible with this final cut for us to think otherwise. But I do think it was added after the fact post mythology rather than pre mythology.

31:30Speaker 4:I think it's as if Ridley Scott had decided, I like the mythology of it better.

31:34Speaker 5:I'm going to embrace it. But it wasn't necessarily there.

31:37Speaker 4:I did hear Harrison Ford saying something, though, that it was something Scott was talking to him about on the set, and he constantly rejected it and would act against that. So that counters my theory. Right, right.

31:48Speaker 1:So for me, the best film would be, and this speaks to your question, Michael, does it make it a better film if he is or if he isn't? The best film for me is the one where it is that tantalizing possibility, where we're not being directed or hit over the head with so many clues, maybe given hints, maybe given suggestions. Yeah. And you leave the film wondering. I mean, it's a little dispiriting that this movie has gotten so gobbled up by such a controversy when it leaves no room for wonder. No, not anymore. That's what the best science fiction does. I will also say this.

32:23Speaker 6:The best science fiction. A lot of it anyway, it really doesn't give a damn about how, if the narrative's working in conventional, satisfying terms. You know, a movie like Terry Gilliam's Brazil is unthinkable without Blade Runner, and it's got a very different sort of retro-futuristic world building going on, but it's similarly amazing to watch and to look at. And that's another one that kind of tells a simple, maybe reductive narrative story just enough to kind of hang Gilliam's preoccupations on. And that's written by good people. And Tom Stoppard worked on that script. And I mean, it's got a lot of, but it doesn't, it's not a story film.

33:05Speaker 1:It just isn't.

33:06Speaker 6:And I think a lot of Metropolis, Fritz Lang's Metropolis back.

33:10Speaker 1:Which- Which if anything sets the tone for Blade Runner. Absolutely.

33:13Speaker 6:Which influenced everything we're talking about, honestly. It's, you know, that's a bunch of kind of adolescent hooey. I mean, frankly, on a story level, I don't care.

33:23Speaker 1:Right. You know, and that's, and.

33:26Speaker 6:As much as I admire Blade Runner and have happily kind of reentered its world and kind of puzzled through these questions about being a replicant or no or whatever, you know, just as much, I'm still the 21-year-old I was struggling to kind of wonder, well, what would have made it, what would have made it really haunt my dreams as opposed to just kind of encouraged me to seek out its visual rewards, which is a little different.

33:57Speaker 1:The craft is unbelievable. I think bad is your answer. I mean, that's a very haunting experience that we're thrust in the middle of, and it's a non-human one, and yet somehow the movie in that climax makes it completely identifiable to me. I mean, that is what elevated this for me on... The rewatch. I knew it would be visually stunning. I was glad to see that the visuals held up so well. But to recognize that it also had this undercurrent of fatalism that did hit, that did land, was probably one of the more rewarding aspects.

34:30Speaker 6:Can we at least agree in closing that we wouldn't mind a different composer?

34:37Speaker 5:Absolutely.

34:37Speaker 1:The Vangelis score really dates it. I think they're... In the sex scene scene.

34:44Speaker 5:That's really brutal. The only point where it bothered me, to be honest.

34:47Speaker 1:I was going to say I found it to be almost like this alongside the rain, this synthetic storm that washed over the movie, especially when we were seeing any cityscape or having any sort of this immersive. scene setting in the world, I thought the score worked really well to have this sort of electronic synth-heavy score. But then you take those same musical techniques and put them in a love scene that's already not working and it's disastrous.

35:11Speaker 6:Yeah, yeah, yeah.

35:16Speaker 4:Reminder that you can join the FilmSpotting family at filmspottingfamily.com. And don't forget to tune in this Friday to hear our Ridley Scott draft with Roxanna Haddadi.

35:29Speaker 5:Thanks for listening.

35:30Speaker 3:This conversation can serve no purpose anymore.

35:34Speaker 2:Goodbye.