Blade Runner's Birthday

On June 25, 1982, Ridley Scott's movie "Blade Runner" was released in theaters in the United States and Canada. The film is based on Philip Kindred Dick's novel "Do Androids Dream of Electric Sheep?", published in 1968.

The idea of the novel "Do Androids Dream of Electric Sheep?" came to Philip K.Dick ("Minority Report") circa 1962. At that time he was working on another novel - "The Man in the High Castle", the genre of which can be defined as "alternative history". This alternative was that Germany won the World War II. To work on this novel, Dick needed archival documents of the Gestapo. In search of these documents, he came across the diaries of SS men stationed in Poland. These diaries were literally saturated with inhuman cruelty, they completely lacked any sympathy for the victims, even for children.

The writer's acquaintance with the original diaries of the SS led him to the idea that Nazism as a whole was a flawed group mind, a mind so emotionally flawed that the word "human" could not be applied to the Nazis. Their lack of empathy was so pronounced that Dick decided that they should not be called people, although their appearance seemed to indicate that they belonged to the species homo sapiens. It was from this thought that the novel "Do androids dream of electric sheep?" was born.

It is known that Martin Scorsese thought about the film adaptation of this novel, but did not dare. Then the idea of a film adaptation came to the mind of United Artists producer Herb Jaffe, and he commissioned his son Robert to write the script. Robert Jaffe wrote a sci-fi comedy script that literally infuriated Dick. The writer even promised to beat the young screenwriter at the meeting.

A few years later, in 1977, another screenwriter, Hampton Fancher, again tried to shift Dick's novel into a script. Fancher's version interested producer Michael Deeley, and he suggested Ridley Scott to make a film based on this script. However, Scott found the script too depressing, and he refused. However, after a short time, Scott's family suffered misfortune: his brother got cancer, which led the director to a state similar to Fancher's script. In 1980, Ridley Scott agreed to direct a film based on Dick's book. But then the author of the novel again expressed his displeasure with the script. Since Fancher refused to change anything in the script, as Dick demanded, Scott hired a new screenwriter - David Webb Peoples ("Unforgiven", "12 Monkeys"). Peoples' version satisfied everyone. By the way, it was he who, at the suggestion of his daughter, replaced the concept of "android" in the script with the concept of "replicant".

Curiously, neither Peoples nor Scott have read the novel itself. Peoples simply took Fancher's script and edited it lightly according to Dick's suggestions. In March 1981, the shooting of the picture began, which lasted 4 months. The film was shot in a very tense environment. Due to American union rules, Briton Ridley Scott could not bring his own British team and felt restricted by strict regulations that prevented him from controlling the camera as he would have liked. He was also constantly frustrated by crew members, financiers and producers, who constantly harassed him with questions about his creative approach and the like. Conversely, most of the American crew did not like working on this film or working with Scott, whom they considered cold and distant, and whose perfectionism led to an increase in the duration of shooting days up to 12-13 hours.

The material created during the filming was shown to Philip Dick in the summer of 1981. Dick appreciated the presented material not only highly. He said that this is how he saw his novel, as shown in the film. And this despite the fact that the script of the film, in fact, was quite different from the novel. Perhaps such a benevolent attitude of the usually captious writer to the film adaptations of his works was caused by complications of illness and a premonition of an imminent death.

Philip Dick praised not only the film as a whole, but also the performance of the leading actors. Of Harrison Ford as Deckard, he said, "He was more Deckard than I imagined. It was incredible. Deckard exists!" And Batty described Rutger Hauer as Roy as "the perfect Batty - cold, Aryan, impeccable."

But the role of Deckard was originally supposed to be Robert Mitchum. But Harrison Ford, after roles in "Star Wars" and "Indiana Jones: Raiders of the Lost Ark", began to fear that the role of an entertaining film hero would stick to him. Therefore, he longed at that moment to play a dramatic role, even if it did not bring significant fees. The role of Rick Deckard, in his opinion, could not be more suitable for this.

As for Rutger Hauer, Ridley Scott chose him for the role of Roy Batty without meeting him and without any screen test. By that time, he had seen Hauer in the films "Turkish Delights" (1973), "Katie Tippel" (1975) and "Soldier of Orange" (1977), and this was quite enough for him to make a choice.

Philip K. Dick did not live to see the premiere of "Blade Runner". He passed away in March 1982. And the film, which was released on June 25 in two countries at once, ran into problems at the box office. These problems consisted in the fact that two weeks before "Blade Runner", Steven Spielberg's film "E.T. the Extra-Terrestrial" was released, and exactly on the same day in the same countries, John Carpenter's film "The Thing" began to be shown in the same cinemas. These two films robbed Scott's movie of a significant portion of the audience, and as a result, "Blade Runner" grossed just over $6 million in its first week. According to the producers, for the picture, the budget of which exceeded $ 28 million, this was a very disturbing sign. Subsequently, the film's box office topped $41 million, but such a modest gross overrun was seen as a commercial failure.

The problems caused by competition at the box office were aggravated by far from the most flattering reviews from film critics. Thus, Janet Maslin, a film reviewer for the most influential The New York Times, devoted a very harsh review to the film, in which, in particular, she noted that the film is inherently

"... a mess, at least as far as its narrative is concerned. Almost nothing is explained coherently, and the plot has great lapses, from the changeable nature of one key character to the frequent disappearances of another. The story lurches along awkwardly, helped not at all by some ponderous stabs at developing Deckard's character. As an old-fashioned detective cruising his way through the space age, Deckard is both tedious and outre."

Film critic of another major American edition of The Washington Post, Gary Arnold, also spoke very sourly about Scott's film:

"The contradictions that plague the movie are apparent from the outset....Invariably overexplicit, the narration tells you more than you want to know and probably need to know, despite the murkiness of certain aspects of the plot....The movie might just as well be happening in a future of simultaneous urban decay and hi-tech advancement that evolved without the specific impetus of a global catastrophe. Unfortunately, the loss of this context leaves the filmmakers at a thematic loss. They try to compensate with a dense, brilliant scenic texture, but it still doesn't compensate for the lost, or at least misplaced, context."

Roger Ebert gave the film three reviews. In the first of them, from 1982, he rated the film three stars out of four and noted that:

"The movie's weakness, however, is that it allows the special effects technology to overwhelm its story....The obligatory love affair is pro forma, the villains are standard issue, and the climax is yet one more of those cliffhangers, with Ford dangling over an abyss by his fingertips. The movie has the same trouble as the replicants: Instead of flesh and blood, its dreams are of mechanical men."

Ten years later, Ebert wrote another review, in which, in general, he repeated the main conclusions of the first one:

"It looks fabulous, it uses special effects to create a new world of its own, but it is thin in its human story."

But in 2007, he wrote a third review, in which he rated the film with the maximum four stars, included the film in his list of "Great Movies" and effectively disavowed his previous claims to the film.:

"I have never quite embraced "Blade Runner," admiring it at arm's length, but now it is time to cave in and admit it to the canon."

Apparently, a well-known saying fits for Ridley Scott's film "Blade Runner": "A good movie, like a good wine, requires aging." This truth reached the guru of American film criticism Roger Ebert for a quarter of a century. To the Russian film critic Sergei Merenkov is much faster. In his review of the film from 2014, he writes:

"Ridley Scott's "Blade Runner" has become not just a fantastic movie masterpiece, but also an integral part of modern culture, giving rise not only to a string of imitations, but also official book sequels, comics and even video games. That is, almost everything, except for the film extension, work on which has been going on shakily since the end of the two thousandth, .... Which means that you need to watch and enjoy the masterpiece original, which is not just decades ahead of its time, but still continues to set the tone for modern fiction."

I note that three years after writing this review, the long-awaited sequel to the film, "Blade Runner 2049", directed by Denis Villeneuve, came out on the screens. But let's talk about this film ahead.

In the meantime, I note that modern viewers around the world rated Ridley Scott's "Blade Runner" much higher than viewers and film critics in the United States and Canada four decades ago. 69% of IMDB and Kinopoisk users rated Scott's film from 8 to 10. And 23% of users gave the film the highest score - "ten". Taking into account this indicator and the above, the rating of Ridley Scott's film "Blade Runner" according to FilmGourmand version was 7.979, which allowed it to take 731st Rank in the Golden Thousand.