On June 25, 1982, Ridley Scott’s film was released, a reflection on the very meaning of being “human”
In Los Angeles, on June 25, 1982, a film set in Los Angeles in 2019 was released, destined to become a cornerstone of postmodernism: “Blade Runner“. It is the first and unsurpassed (free) film adaptation of a work by the dystopian science fiction writer Philip K. Dick (the only precedent, an episode of the British TV series “Out of this World”, made exactly twenty years earlier): the novel “The Android Hunter / Do Androids Dream of Electric Sheep?” of 1968, which in the hands of regista Ridley Scott it becomes not only a powerful reflection on a central theme of the philosophy of all time (from Aristotle to Merleau-Ponty), that is the very meaning of being “human”, but above all one of the latest, most complex and extraordinary machines for producing images “Pure” and never seen before in the entire history of cinema.
The Earth, polluted and dehumanized, has been gradually abandoned by the wealthiest who have found refuge in the “extra-world colonies” of the planet Mars, while in an urban scenario constantly beaten by rain, those who remain move inside megalopolises as swarming and dark as the precarious lives of their inhabitants . In this context, the multinational of tycoon Eldon Tyrell (Joe Turkel) has created synthetic human beings with conscience and aware of their nature, indistinguishable from real people and the “term” life cycle of only four years, the replicants , as a new workforce in the colonies. When a rebel group of four, led by the tormented Roy Batty (Rutger Hauer), flee to Earth in order to ask for “more life” from its creator, the reluctant and defeated bounty hunter Rick Deckard (Harrison Ford), skilled in the ‘identifying their artificial nature, he is instructed to hunt them down. And in the course of the investigation she meets Tyrell’s charming secretary, Rachael (Sean Young), an even more evolved model of replicant with no “expiration” and convinced that she is human because of the false memories that have been implanted in her, of which she ends up. with falling in love with her. You will be right of her “enemies”: but at what existential price?
Immersed in a decadent and intimately noir atmosphere (starting from the Marlowe-like characteristics of the protagonist, whose “over” voice punctuates the narrative like the classics of the 1940s genre), “Blade Runner” plays all its futuristic cards, approaching philosophy with its “retrofuturist” look cyberpunk, thanks also to high-contrast photography (by Jordan Cronenweth), which with its limited use of color and its beams of light, creates a gap between the sci-fi dimension of the context and suggestions rooted in black and white genre cinema. And if the overall vision of the future that underlies (va) has obviously not been realized, the ability to grasp in advance and in detail some features now integrated into our technological and iconic present is impressive: animated “digital” billboards, video calls , the architectural design of the metropolis, the sentient development of artificial intelligence and the anthropomorphization of robots, home automation (with the incredible sequence in Deckard’s house managed by an ante litteram Alexa computer that makes it possible for him to magnify even the irrelevant detail of a photograph exactly like today it could be isolated with a smartphone).
Elements that in retrospect still leave you speechless today, to which the catastrophic “ecological” premonitions must be added, but also the ability to know how to immerse the vision of the future of everyday life in a paradoxical timelessness (just think of the extraordinary work of costume designers Michael Kaplan and Charles Knode). At the height of his popularity, Harrison Ford accepted a role in total contradiction to his hero figure (he was already Han Solo and Indiana Jones), in a cast with no other stars to contend for his name on the bill; but despite her capitalized interpretation, the characters of Rachael (a debutante and unforgettable Sean Young, whose career has never reached these heights: splendid above all in the pivotal sequence of the Voight-Kampff test, immersed in darkness and very dense smoke of his cigarette, which gradually vanishes allowing the viewer to grasp the confusion of the automaton in the face of the truth about its nature) and Batty (the Dutch Rutger Hauer, former fetish actor of Paul Verhoeven at home and recently landed in Hollywood) always steal the show.
But the film is above all a masterpiece by summation of all the main characteristics of cinema: light, sound, movement, scenography (by Lawrence G. Paull and David Snyder), design (by Syd Mead), special effects (supervised by the “Kubrickian” master Douglas Trumbull), music (one of the most famous and best scores of the recently deceased Vangelis Papathanassiou). The density of the individual images (and their degree of unknown exclusivity) is impressive: each shot (also in accordance with the director’s advertising roots, at a time when even the “message” of the production of commercial images responded to incomparable regulatory requirements to the current ones) is overloaded, stratified, visionary; designed according to an alienating and exhausting logic which is the key to the aesthetic and narrative interpretation of the film itself.
Although classifiable as a kind of thriller, “Blade Runner” practically never yields either to the logic of the action movie or to those of the phantasmagoric show (which at the bottom is) an end in itself: it is the primary intuition of the script by Hampton Fancher and David Peoples, which besides to hinge on the afflicted nature of the protagonist, without ever completely explaining the causes, he elects as anti-heroes Roy Batty and his frightened associates, endowed with the same rationality of their father-builder (among Oedipal drifts that descend straight from Sophocles), giving the whole I tell a painful trend destined to implode in a final without catharsis. With an anti-Aristotelian paradox (but also totally agnostic, to the point of atheism) “artificial” beings are actually “more human than human”, as the slogan of the corporation that created them says; or even -nickly- “human, too human”. Like men, they cling with all their strength to the relativity of the time of life; and like them, they live on memories, emotions and experiences; but as sentient “machines” unable to reason in fideistic terms they perceive “death” as a tragic “deactivation” without rewards.
“I’ve seen things about it that you humans couldn’t imagine you: battleships on fire off the ramparts of Orion… and I saw the B-rays flashing in the dark near the gates of Tannhäuser. And all those moments will be lost in time, like tears in the rain. It’s time to die ”. The now famous final monologue by Rutger Hauer / Batty (written / improvised by the actor himself modifying the script; and shot as the last sequence of the working plan) is the culmination of this reflection: sitting cross-legged in front of his “hunter “Before exhaling his last breath, is the replicant accepting the philosophy of the order of things or sealing its absurdity as a rebel with his inevitable” sacrifice “? And what future awaits Rick Deckard now, determined to take Rachael with him? And won’t he be a replicant himself? Both an alternative version of the film (the less fascinating “director’s cut” of 1993 without narrative voice and with the revealing detail of the unicorn-origami dream) and the excellent sequel by Denis Villeneuve tried to give answers to these last two questions. “Blade Runner 2049”, in 2017. But, in both cases, it is better to hold on to the original unattainable.
June 25, 2022 (change June 25, 2022 | 08:18)
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