Ridley Scott
Blade Runner

With Ridley Scott's "Blade Runner," we find ourselves facing an extremely complex and fascinating film: in my opinion, the director's expressive peak (not reached again thereafter), which manages to create a puzzle with endless references, a cinematic vision of rare power, in a word, a masterpiece rich with an almost infinite series of implications and levels of interpretation. I even find it arduous to identify a starting point for describing some of the elements of "Blade Runner" that personally fascinated me the most.

I attempt to break free from the "blank page" dilemma by choosing the simplest and most traditional route, starting with the incipit, which is already in itself a true declaration of intent: a twilight beginning that foreshadows the whole atmosphere of the film in which Scott opts for a hiccuping montage that continuously fragments the rhythm, giving very little fluidity to the vision and immediately suggesting that we are facing a film that does not intend to proceed smoothly in a straight line.

If we were to frame the film within a genre, we would certainly identify it as a cyberpunk film, or rather the first true cyberpunk genre film: a science fiction genre that appeared completely new at the time when "Blade Runner" was released in theaters (in 1982), creating a real break with the science fiction we were accustomed to seeing in movies until then.

If we look closely, even before "Blade Runner," some of the main themes of cyberpunk literature appeared in films such as:

- Metropolis, by F. Lang, where the robot Maria is a predecessor of the much more advanced replicants of Blade Runner;

- 2001: A Space Odyssey, by S. Kubrick, where the machine (the computer HAL 9000) replaces man in what should be his primary characteristic, namely the ability to think;

- A Clockwork Orange, also by S. Kubrick, where, although there is no representation of the advanced technologies present in Blade Runner, there is already the typical setting in a city (London) populated by gangs of "droogs" and plagued by drugs.

In my view, these films only anticipated and/or foreshadowed some of the elements that Blade Runner developed more completely. In particular, Ridley Scott, starting from the story "Do Androids Dream of Electric Sheep?" by Philip K. Dick, has created a film that goes far beyond the story itself and, focusing on the issues of life of cybernetic organisms, indeed, ventures into a deep investigation of metaphysical and philosophical aspects of human life.

However, "Blade Runner" lacks a fundamental concept of cyberpunk because it still needed to be fully realized in the years following Scott's film, particularly thanks to writers like William Gibson and Bruce Sterling in their works written between 1984 and the early nineties: that is, the concept of cyberspace. That virtual reality or real virtuality that would be better represented in 1995 by the film Johnny Mnemonic (by R. Longo) and especially in 1999 by the film The Matrix (by the Wachowsky brothers).

Certainly, however, many post-Blade Runner cyberpunk films consciously or unconsciously recall its "look," atmospheres, and visual settings, which in my opinion are spectacular, evocative, chilling.

"Blade Runner," however, is not just cyberpunk: it is much more. First of all, the initial insistence on the eye image, which represents not just the image to look at, but at the same time the image to look into to glimpse the reflection of Los Angeles, as well as a representation of an eye watching the viewer: one cannot help but notice here the reference to the metadiscourse on cinema and the reference to "Film" by Alan Schneider.

Another very evident reference is to the myth of the "modern Prometheus" present in M. Shelley's "Frankenstein": the similarity between the replicant (the Nexus 6) and the "creature" from the novel "Frankenstein" is especially realized in the fact that the two "creatures" share the same fate: namely the rejection of paternity from which the malaise afflicting them originates. However, while the creature wants to kill Frankenstein because he gave life to an abomination, the replicant Roy will end up killing his creator Tyrell for the opposite reason: because his creator is unable to give him a longer life. Similarly to what happens in Frankenstein, the source of the creature's fury is not to be found in an error or anomaly in its "manufacturing," but in the context in which the creature finds itself living: a world that fears, flees, and hunts it.

In "Blade Runner," the true revolution consists in having introduced and explored themes of a science fiction that does not aim so much to capture the viewers' sense of wonder by exploiting the usual clichés linked to hyper-technological gadgets or the exploration of mysteries from deep space, but rather in having provided a vision of lifestyle and society in a future that appears so concretely tangible, thanks to a veritable flood of images so realistic and plausible as to appear, in reality, more "futurible" than futuristic and not far from us.

Scott shows us a bleak world, populated by outcasts and poor souls: a grim and absolutely negative vision: the movie is immersed in a dark and claustrophobic atmosphere: there are never any openings and there is never room for light, except for the cold and impersonal light of the many colored neons that appear in almost every sequence. All the characters are victims: each of them is a cog in a much more complex and larger machine than they are. The only character that can truly be said to be above the system and, in this sense, "winning," is the rebel leader replicant (Roy) because he is the only one who attempts to rebel against a system where everyone is nothing more than "spare parts" whose sole purpose is to fuel the "great machine" (The Matrix is just around the corner, but it will take a few more years before we can visualize the scenarios proposed by the Wachowsky brothers).

These are characters to whom Scott has been able to impart psychological depth and moral weight: Deckard, the bounty hunter police officer, is certainly not the incorruptible and pristine solitary hero, filled with ideals in full "Judge Dredd" style (just to cite an example of a cyberpunk superhero comic, from which the eponymous film was also derived), but rather a borderline character who never knows where good resides and where evil begins. A character who moves with the awareness that Good does not always go hand in hand with the Law: exemplary in this regard is the final confrontation between Deckard and Roy, which throws the viewer into the absolute loss of references between what is good and what is evil: dismantling at a single stroke certain cinema (not just science fiction) so flatly rhetorical and pathetically hypocritical.

The only words charged with passion come from Roy's mouth, and it is no coincidence that the only moment Scott gives us an opening is precisely the flight of the dove escaping from Roy's hand, just expired, in which we see a quick glimpse of blue sky. This is the most lyrical moment of the whole film and closes the famous scene of the confrontation between Deckard and Roy: a moment of lyricism that gets lost in the river of dark and claustrophobic sequences of the film, in the same way Roy's memories are lost like tears in rain.

If you are familiar with Scott's vision, you cannot help but be absolutely amazed by how the "director's cut" version (that is, the one originally conceived by the director, or the film as it should have been projected from the start) was distorted by the "happy ending" style desired by the production, where there is a stark tone shift compared to the rest of the film. The director's cut's ending indeed does not close with the scene where Deckard and Rachel escape to an idyllic place where there is a happy ending "...and they lived happily ever after": but closes with Deckard and Rachel entering an elevator, while just a moment before Deckard finds on his apartment's landing an unmistakable trace of Gaff's passage: an origami depicting a small unicorn. At the moment Deckard picks it up, perhaps a doubt creeps into his mind that he himself is a replicant because if Gaff is aware of his unicorn dream (the scene of Deckard dreaming the unicorn, moreover, is only present in the director's cut) it means it is a fake memory implanted in his mind and that Gaff, as a police officer, has been able to view.

It is fascinating then Scott's choice to assign the role of revolutionary to a replicant and not to a human (or at least to the character who should most closely align with the concept of human, namely Deckard): instead, it is a machine that must bear revolutionary instances that should instead be dear to a human: and here one might long question oneself about the perception of man himself as a machine. Where, in the end, lies the difference between man and a cybernetic organism capable of having feelings? Isn't man perhaps also a machine of bones? (Any reference to the album "Bone Machine" by Tom Waits is purely coincidental). Here is another double somersault of Blade Runner, whose final message seems to be precisely that the entity "man," understood in the sense given by religious interpretations, no longer exists since man is so accustomed to and integrated into the system that he no longer even feels the need to see himself as an individual in self-perception, above and outside of the system that, in addition to enslaving him, nullifies him by depriving him of his status as a free individual endowed with autonomy of thought: because, in fact, in Scott's vision, these are all prerogatives now exclusive to replicants and no longer to humans. The conclusion at this point seems inevitable: in a dehumanized and impersonal world, obsessed with continuous, silly promotional messages (I leave it to you to decide to what extent this vision is prophetic of today's world) and irreparably ruined by some conflict or cataclysm that has compromised Nature, man has had to recreate himself to find a being capable of rebelling against it all.

The new beings now seem the only ones capable of feeling and having self-awareness ("I think, therefore I am," says the replicant Pris at one point, quoting René Descartes) and, for this reason, they are also the only ones who still feel the desire for life and the sense of rebellion against their enslaved condition ("rebel angel" the leader of the replicants calls himself upon his first appearance in the film), and at the film's end, Roy overturns the perception of himself, moving from the connotation of Lucifer to that of the "Son of Man": of Christ who crucifies himself (the symbolic act of planting the nail in his hand speaks for itself) and then saves Deckard's life to bear witness to his infinite love for the life he is forced to abandon because his creator willed it so. How can all his humanity not be seen here, sublimated in the final act of "salvation," sparing Deckard's life?

Scott creates a magical film: a film full of meanings and with dilated times: a fast-paced film that keeps the viewer in suspense and leads them to discover a powerful and innovative vision, full of charm and highly suggestive.

An unmissable masterpiece.