No Two Replicants

One of the most questionable aspects of cinema as an art form is the opportunity (or should I say temptation) for sequels or “prequels”, those so many times disastrous Part II (III, IV…VII?).  If a movie is great, it is also complete in every way. I guess you could say that repeating elements of a work of art does exist in other art forms; I mean Claude Monet did paint over 200 Nymphéas, but I can think of very few artistic movies that have an equally artistic sequel.  If it has occurred, it is usually where the work of fiction that the film is based on couldn’t be captured in just one movie, like Francis Ford Coppola’s The Godfather and The Godfather II (and it stops there in that trilogy); or Claude Berri’s duology Jean de Florette, which was followed by the equally well accomplished Manon des Sources.

In film, sequels tend to exist more for commercial reasons. They also usually appear with annoying frequency in the action, science fiction, horror and children’s movie genres. There are, after all, 23 Bond movies, eight Star Wars, and quite successful sequels to movies like Shrek, Toy Story, Batman and Iron Man. I really can’t say, however, how I feel about a sequel to my favorite science fiction / action movie: Blade Runner.  Since the release of Prometheus last year (Ridley Scott’s movie that “shares DNA” with his Alien), Ridley himself has announced work on a Blade Runner 2. The internet has since been full of movie magazines that announce release dates, chats and discussion rooms about its content, screenwriters and stars, and even fake trailers to the Blade Runner sequel.

I’ve dedicated a post to Ridley Scott, one of my favorite directors (see: The Insightful Ridley Scott), but I could easily dedicate more than one post to Blade Runner, which I consider to be his best piece. The movie was filmed in 1982, based on the novel by Phillip K. Dick “Do Androids Dream of Electric Sheep?” published in 1968, long before there was even the dream of carrying around an Android in one’s purse. 

The movie takes place in Los Angeles of the year 2019, where genetic engineering has led to the creation of robots called replicants, virtually impossible to distinguish from human beings. They are banned from use on Earth to basically be exploited on off-world colonies. When they manage to escape and come back to Earth, they are hunted down by special police known as Blade Runners. The main character in the movie, Rick Deckard (Harrison Ford at his best) is one such Blade Runner, a sort of retro-detective in this neo-noir film.  With old-fashioned voice-over narration (removed in the director’s cut released in 1992), Deckard has the wry humor of a retired cop who has seen too much and now has that who-gives-a-damn attitude that fits well with Ford’s movie persona.

Harrison Ford as Rick Deckard

 The replicants have been perfected by humans to the point that they are given artificial memories, they are highly intelligent, extremely strong and, as computers tend to do in science fiction movies, have developed feelings. To ensure that they won’t eventually dominate humans, they have also been given an “expiration date”… much like the one we have.  And so begins their fight for survival. It is us against them, where we humans are both the creators and the created, hunters and hunted, oppressors and oppressed; androids and humans living under the shadow of greedy and inhuman corporations, those non-persons which are a constant in many of Scott’s films.

Blade Runner is about what it means to be human, more so in an era where we are overrun by technology, technology that we have to struggle to control so that it won’t destroy us. Maybe that is why this movie has become so famous in the many years after its release.

The complex story line is bathed in great set design and special effects (I saw the model of the Tyrel Corporation building in the Museum of the Moving Image in Queens and the monster of a building we see in the movie is incredibly small), with wonderful camera work, editing and directing, most particularly towards the end of the movie in J.F. Sebastian’s apartment, especially in the final face-off between Harrison Ford and Rutger Hauer as the amazing replicant leader of the rebels, Roy. The movie is made whole the moment Roy speaks his final lines. It is a moment of climax, which leads wonderfully into the final scenes. We’ve held our breaths during those dark and violent scenes and slowly let them out as the movie winds down.



Rutger Hauer as the replicant Roy

How, then, to replicate this in a sequel? It is hard for me to imagine a Blade Runner 2. It is my hope that the brilliant, creative mind of Ridley Scott will be able to do so without letting us down. We know it can’t be for commercial reasons that he will be making a sequel. It might be out of nostalgia or because he has something new to say about this Android filled, corporation dominated world of the twenty-first century.