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Blade Runner at 25, Why the F/X Still Matter
Posted by
CmdrTaco
on Mon Jun 25, 2007 11:48 AM
from the beware-the-thighs-that-crush dept.
from the beware-the-thighs-that-crush dept.
mattnyc99 writes "Today marks the 25th anniversary of the release of Blade Runner, Ridley Scott's dark vision of the future that changed the future of filmmaking and still stands up today, argues Adam Savage of The MythBusters (and the F/X crews of The Matrix and Star Wars). Between the "lived-in science fiction," pre-CGI master models, futuristic cityscapes and tricked-out cars, don't you agree? And after we got the first official glimpse of him from Indiana Jones 4 this weekend, isn't Harrison Ford still the man?"
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Blade Runner at 25, Why the F/X Still Matter
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didn't know what a steier .222 looked like, found (Score:4, Informative)
Special edition DVD? (Score:5, Interesting)
Re:Special edition DVD? (Score:5, Informative)
(http://www.steelray.com/)
"Blade Runner: Final Cut will arrive in 2007 for a limited 25th-anniversary theatrical run, followed by a special-edition DVD with the three previous versions offered as alternate viewing."
Re:I want the voice over (Score:5, Informative)
Re:Special edition DVD? (Score:5, Interesting)
I've been wracking my brain trying to come up with reasons why I need to upgrade to an HD disc format. We love movies and have the A/V firepower to work with an HD disc player, but we use our DVD player for so much more than just movies, such as Firefly discs and videos for my kids. At best, then, any HD disc would be used for 1/3 of the things we use our current DVD player.
Not worth the money and time.
Re:Special edition DVD? (Score:5, Insightful)
Oops.
Dystopian future (Score:4, Funny)
Just remove the wires, OK? (Score:5, Interesting)
(http://www.fastriver.com/)
"All this will be lost, like tears in the rain"
"Time to die"
Re:Just remove the wires, OK? (Score:5, Funny)
(http://www.nine-times.org/)
Re:Just remove the wires, OK? (Score:5, Funny)
(http://www.covenantspice.com/)
Re:Just remove the wires, OK? (Score:5, Interesting)
(http://www.kibbee.ca/)
Re:Just remove the wires, OK? (Score:5, Funny)
(http://randomcoolzip.blogspot.com/)
Re:Just remove the wires, OK? (Score:5, Funny)
(http://stylus-toolbox.sf.net/ | Last Journal: Tuesday May 15, @11:50AM)
Poor, Harrison.
Re:Just remove the wires, OK? (Score:4, Funny)
Maybe? (Score:4, Funny)
Oh, shit! Put a spoiler alert above that!
Re:Maybe? (Score:4, Funny)
(http://www.jonnythan.com/)
Re:Maybe? (Score:4, Interesting)
(http://www.wdogsystems.com/ | Last Journal: Thursday October 06 2005, @10:10AM)
Re:Maybe? (Score:5, Interesting)
(https://addons.mozil...&application=firefox)
Re:Maybe? (Score:4, Interesting)
CGI is nice, but let's not forget ... (Score:1, Interesting)
Re:CGI is nice, but let's not forget ... (Score:5, Funny)
(http://www.neverwhen.net/)
Re:CGI is nice, but let's not forget ... (Score:5, Funny)
(http://babelfish.alt...%2F%2Fslashdot.jp%2F)
And its strange English-to-Chinese-to-English subtitle:
"Do Not Want".
it would have been way better (Score:1)
(http://www.wintermarket.net/)
the idea he was cheating on his wife with a replicant made the story a tad more intersting
esp when she throws his goat off the top of the building and then his wife find s out
that said the effects do stand up
i heard philip k dick patterned his city off of vancouver,
the dark depressing rains of the north west really set the tone well
Re:it would have been way better (Score:5, Insightful)
Re:it would have been way better (Score:5, Insightful)
Re:it would have been way better (Score:5, Interesting)
The emphasis, as I read it, of Dick's novel was that no matter how real something seems, it is never as good as the real thing. No matter how realistically a replicant could look or act, it would never - ever - really be human.
The movie took the opposite stance. We created the replicants as slaves, but we made them too human - quite possibly "More human than human". Replicants were harsh, violent, and angry - which makes sense considering that they had the emotional experience of a 4 year old. They knew fear - not the reflexive mechanical fear of the book's replicants, but wild animal fear of a human who doesn't want to die. In the book, a replicant that knew it was screwed just gave in - in the movie, they did anything... anything they could... to escape and survive another day. I also don't recall replicants really caring for eachother in the book - whereas in the movie is was a primary driving force. The pictures they kept in the book were mostly to keep up appearances, while in the movie it was a sad attempt at building a past.
Also you have to admit - Batty as he was in the book wouldn't have been that memorable a villain. In the movie, he was one of the most memorable fictional villains ever. A ruthless poetic madman who was getting a crash course in emotions and ethics, and who didn't really understand life until the very end.
The book was good, but I'll take the movie any day - not just for cool factor, but because I feel the movie had far greater literary value (watered down as it was to suit the needs of a 90-minute action movie).
Re:it would have been way better (Score:5, Insightful)
(http://slashdot.org/~DiamondGeezer/)
That's interesting because Batty isn't a bad guy at all - what changes is our perceptions about who is good and who is bad. We are prejudiced against Batty because of what he was created to do, and all of the other replicants. We think that Deckard is the good guy - except that it was Batty, not Deckard, that showed mercy, love and compassion.
"Aren't you supposed to be the good guy, Deckard?"
In the end, the real monstrosity is mankind, willing to create a slave race of people who think, feel and remember just like we can - and then give them only four years to live and a single dreadful task to perform for that time - and be grateful to their Creator for this?
"I've done...questionable things" says Batty. This isn't a robot, its a thinking sentient being asking "Why am I here? Is this all there is?" But Tyrell couldn't see it. And we can't see it - until its too late.
Blade Runner is one of the greatest movies of all time - a genuine classic whose philosophical themes will be discussed for decades to come - long after trash like Indiana Jones is forgotten.
i love blade runner (Score:5, Insightful)
(http://circletimessquare.com/)
the problem with most science fiction movies is that the sampling of the philosophical implications of their subject matter is too shallow (or they are outright fantasy riffs without any attempt at philosophisizing). you don't get that with a good sci fi book. a good sci fi book gets you to really think and wonder. a good science fiction movie just usually entertains you... sometimes entertains you REALLY well, but the thinking part isn't usually there
but blade runner really got to me. especially the scenes at the end, with deckard and batty, the movie collapsed all of the science fiction trappings into meaning: the essential human struggles with life and death and what is the whole damn point anyway? blade runner really sticks with you. every time i watch it i think of something new
i really don't know of a better example of how deeply a 2 hour scifi movie can really get to you in a deep way
well maybe contact [imdb.com], but contact comes second in my mind to blade runner
Re:i love blade runner (Score:4, Interesting)
Re:i love blade runner (Score:4, Insightful)
(http://www.samkass.com/blog | Last Journal: Thursday May 12 2005, @02:40PM)
I agree that Blade Runner is one of the best science fiction movies of all time. And it stands up amazingly well to modern special effects and scenery. But the movie is still a movie-- entertainment with tunnel-vision, spoon-fed philosophy.
Re:i love blade runner (Score:5, Insightful)
(Last Journal: Thursday January 06 2005, @02:26PM)
As for one being deeper than the other... personally, I find the movie's resolution of the synthetic/authentic dichotomy more satisfying. The book says that the synthetic is never as "good" as the authentic. The movie says it can be.
This analysis is consonant with my impression of Penrose re: AI's potential. Penrose says we can't simulate intelligence using Von Neumann computers because intelligence relies on quantum-mechanical nondeterministic computation to evade Godel's incompleteness theorem. I say that Penrose has made at least three significant errors: 1) his argument that human intelligence does successfully evade Godel's incompleteness theorem is pure speculation; 2) simple electrochemical models of brain operation include nondeterministic elements (neurotransmitter diffusion, etc.), without any need for quantum-level effects; and 3) that it would be difficult to add probabilistic operations to Von Neumann systems if nondeterministic elements were found to be necessary to simulate intelligence.
Don't get me wrong. I love reading PKD's stuff and am a huge fan. I just happen to disagree with his thesis in that story ("Do Androids Dream of Electric Sheep"), and that disagreement leads me to be more satisfied with Ridley Scott's variation on the story.
Regards,
Ross
Re:i love blade runner (Score:4, Insightful)
In Blade Runner, Scott mixes the two pretty effectively. Decker, Rachael, the police chief, etc. dress pretty conservatively, and they hold up pretty well. The extras and many of the replicants, on the other hand, look like leftovers from a Sex Pistols concert.
Re:i love blade runner (Score:4, Funny)
Contact is definitely first in my list, because of the "my daddy is an alien" and "your mind can't bear how we actually look" cop-out ending.
You gotta be very brave to masterfully build suspence for hours in this otherwise great movie, and end with daddy talking condescendingly to the main protagonist "honey, you're too stupid to even have a look at me".
I mean, what the hell could they be? Really ugly fat green gelatinous blob monster? Seen that [darkhorse.com]. Gaseous purple clouds? Seen that, too (although the comic version [wikimedia.org] looks kinda different).
I mean WHAT, what the hell did it look like? Maybe they all looked like middle-aged average dads and this is why all the lies. Outer space jerks.
Re:i love blade runner (Score:4, Informative)
There is a lot of good "grown-up" science fiction in movies out there for those willing to look for it. I would add movies like "12 Monkeys" and "Primer" (rare serious looks at the ramifications of time travel) as personal favorites, as well as (of course) "2001: A Space Odyssey," one of the few science fiction films to treat alien/human (or is it God/human?) contact in any serious way. "Gattaca" was also good, but a bit heavy-handed for my tastes. A lot of people hated "The Fountain," but I thought it was an interesting meditation on human mortality.
Re:i love blade runner (Score:4, Insightful)
I don't think that's a particularly accurate characterization of Blade Runner. While it's true that the big flashy action scenes were replicants killing people, the whole point was that they weren't just mindless or evil killing machines embodying a metaphor for technology gone too far. The point was nearly the opposite of that; they were, fundamentally, human. Humans whose situation and capabilities exceeded their emotional maturity, and who were failing to deal with that in the way that humans are wont to do.
They were in fact the most terrifying of all things: extremely powerful children. Blade Runner has less in common with Terminator than with Lord of the Flies.
Re:A.I. (Score:4, Insightful)
(http://del.icio.us/Abcd1234/)
Re:A.I. (Score:5, Interesting)
(First off, I know you didn't say this, but it'll inevitably come up--those aren't aliens, damnit! They're advanced mecha. One of them is even the narrator; the movie starts with him/it saying "Those were the days when..." It's unfortunate that so many people never realized this, but on the other hand it clicks if you watch it a second time and then you get a lot more out of it.)
Many people have called the movie a fairy tale, and they'd be right to do so. But you can take that even further; it's a fairy tale that advanced mecha tell each other, long after humans have gone extinct. What parts of the last half-hour were real, if any? When he went back to his house that seemed both real and eerily artificial, the visuals suggested to me that it was all a vision in his head. They read his mind anyways; they might as well have been feeding him these images, even as he was really still half-frozen at the bottom of the ice excavation. The time-space continuum excuse especially sounded like a fabricated lie... Was it inevitable that David would be woken up by *something* someday, simply because he was not mortal? Perhaps there are thousands of discarded robots like him, buried inside the frozen Earth. The advanced mechas eventually dig out and feed a similar story to each that finally satisfies and terminate its program. Is this compassion between robots? Why do they do it? Are they trying to make robots dream, or are they saying that death is just another dream?
The movie asked a lot of questions about what it means to be human--similar to BR, but focused on love. I remember a particular review of A.I. (it had quite good reviews) that summed it up quite well and it seems to me the message of the movie: "To be real is to be mortal; to be human is to love, to dream and to perish." Perhaps that's why the advanced mechas gave him the choice. Hmm...
Anyways, personally I found that the ending was incredibly sad and not a happy one at all. I disagree that it would have been at all satisfying for the movie to just end on the ocean's floor, and for David to truly never "die." But you could take it either way, and stuff like this is why I found it so fascinating. And then of course there was the (first "mature") Alternate Reality Game/viral marketing that was really neat in itself. Ultimately, of course, it's up to your own experience.
For a 50 year old guy... (Score:4, Funny)
(http://www.fluidlight.com/drew)
Oh...what? Damn!
On today's Mythbusters... (Score:5, Funny)
Re:On today's Mythbusters... (Score:4, Funny)
(Last Journal: Tuesday August 07, @01:18PM)
But Is Deckard A Replicant? Or Not? (Score:5, Interesting)
(http://www.ausoleil.org/)
"Knowing" Phillip K. Dick (through reading most of his works) I think personally the answer is a yes, but the debate has raged on for a long time, at least when the subject comes up. Others say no, and that's the greatness of the movie: you can't be completely sure.
Read #14 of the Blade Runner FAQ here [faqs.org] and ponder it for yourself.
For...
Ridley Scott and Harrison Ford have stated that Deckard was meant to be a
replicant. In Details magazine (US) October 1992 Ford says:
"Blade Runner was not one of my favorite films. I tangled
with Ridley. The biggest problem was that at the end, he wanted the
audience to find out that Deckard was a replicant. I fought that
because I felt the audience needed somebody to cheer for."
Against...
- Could you trust a replicant to kill other replicants? Why did the police
trust Deckard?
- Having Deckard as a replicant implies a conspiracy between the police and
Tyrell.
And so forth and so on...
Re:But Is Deckard A Replicant? Or Not? (Score:5, Informative)
(Last Journal: Friday September 17 2004, @08:59AM)
http://slashdot.org/article.pl?sid=00/07/09/20582
Re:But Is Deckard A Replicant? Or Not? (Score:5, Insightful)
If Ridley Scott does alter that, I think we're going to hear a lot of cries to the effect of "you ruined my childhood memories!" or rather, the memories of my angst-filled adolescence when late at night, watching TV alone in the dark, I stumbled across Blade Runner on TV...