More than 30 years have passed since the "Blade Runner" movie was released in 1982. The world line in the present world has already passed the stall of November 2019.
Humans, however, don't seem to be as smart as they expected when the movie was created. Our cars are still crawling on the ground, the huge crowds are still just tall buildings, and the sky is only blocked by the occasional smog.
One of Philip Dick's science fiction series, Blade Runner is based on his 1968 novel Do Androids Dream of Electric Sheep? Part of the storyline in Do Androids Dream of Electric Sheep?. Among them, the name "Blade Runner" is taken from the name of "the crowd selling illegal surgical instruments" in the novel.
It is worth mentioning that, for the era of "Blade Runner", it has undergone many adjustments in the process from novel to film.
When Dick wrote the original in 1967, he imagined the world in 1992.
In 1980, when the novel was republished in the United States, the publisher believed that according to the current technological development, the 92-year time limit could not be justified, so the time was changed to 2021;
In 1982, the "Blade Runner" movie was released, and director Ridley Coster set the timeline back a little, so there was a classic title -
November, 2019
Although the background time has been adjusted many times, the development of technology has not caught up with the vision of the year when human beings really reached this day. So the expectations of the year continue today, and the dream of cyberpunk continues.
Speaking of movies, as a sci-fi movie in the 1980s, "Blade Runner" laid the foundation for the cyberpunk style of the next 30 years with low-cost and almost independent plots. What kind of accidents and coincidences are there in this? How did this legendary team present the film?
In the dystopian social scene depicted in the film, what message or even an early warning does the film try to convey through the proposition of replicating people?
With these questions worth exploring, let's go back to "Blade Runner" in 1982, back to the cyber world where rain and night are intertwined.
Blade Runner - Born by accident
- Cyberpunk from "Province"
"Blade Runner" is the cornerstone of the cyberpunk movie style. In the scene design, the dark skyline, the cold rainy night, and the giant buildings in the neon artificial light are still used as the characteristics of cyberpunk to this day.
But in fact, many of the cyber elements praised by later generations are just compromises made by director Ridley Scott to cover up the humble set.
Before filming "Blade Runner", Ridley had just finished filming "Alien". Originally expected to cost $8.9 million, the film ended up with $9.4 million. Although it only exceeded a small amount, Ridley was still praised by the film industry as "big money".
Therefore, Ridley, who was once again planning to shoot sci-fi themes, hit a wall when looking for investment for "Blade Runner". After a two-year gap period, he finally had to choose to build a set on the open field of a cheap studio. to shoot.
"There's nothing I can do about it," Ridley described his mood in an interview with veteran Blade Runner researcher Paul M. Sammon.
However, after the official start of filming, the "Blade Runner" crew experienced the withdrawal of the film road studio, so that the start-up capital that was finally collected was gone.
Meanwhile, in the 1980s, after two high-budget, low-box-office films, "1941" and "Road to Paradise," there was an atmosphere of austerity throughout the film industry.
Running short of funds, the crew eventually found Ryder and Tedros to put together a $22.5 million budget for the film. You know, Star Wars: Return of the Jedi, a sci-fi movie released in 1983, cost a whopping $32.5 million.
In order to save costs, the long shot in the film uses all kinds of messy things to act as buildings. For example, a few wires and sundries stand on a rocket head that has been used up from another movie, and it becomes a towering building in the distant view.
In addition, during the shooting process, the open-air studio was surrounded by various hills, and it was a huge expense to use digital methods to remove these hills.
So Ridley simply set all the shots and scenes of the movie to be dark and rainy, and then added a lot of smoke and neon light pollution to block the surrounding hills.
So by chance, the psychedelic cyber style, which is praised by modern people, appeared like this.
- "Rebel" actor
In the "Blade Runner" film, starring Harrison Ford (Harrison Ford) and Rutger Hauer (Rutger Hauer) have contributed extraordinary performances. However, behind the excellent acting skills contributed by these two is the "rebellion" that originated from the two performances.
Let's talk about Ford first. As a popular actor who just finished "Star Wars 4: A New Hope", Ford hoped to take on a deep role to challenge himself, so he chose "Blade Runner" with a hard sci-fi background.
Unexpectedly, after the film started, Ford's understanding of the film was very different from that of director Ridley, and the two often argued over the performance and positioning of the characters.
When it comes to this, we can't help but mention a koan case left in the film history of "Blade Runner" - is the protagonist Rick Deckard a android or a human?
In the plot arrangement, the audience can find several details suggesting that the protagonist is an android. But in Ford's performance, there are more emotional characteristics that belong to human beings.
In fact, this divergence between the plot and the cast stems from actor Ford and director Ridley's understanding of the characters.
For Ford, as the protagonist of the empathy test and the capture of the replicants, his human aptitude creates a legitimate opposition to the replicants.
Ridley, on the other hand, believes that being a replicant can better elicit the emotional resonance with the heroine Rachael.
So with different opinions, Ford completed the role. And this difference of opinion eventually evolved into the confusion of character identities, which led to a koan case in film history.
For the character Roy played by Hal, a soulful monologue before the character's death has created the sublimation of the whole film .
As the villain in the film, when the bionic man's life of only four years was about to come to an end, facing the protagonist Rick, he sent out the last paragraph of emotion about life.
This monologue was named "one of the 10 classic moments in film history" by the British "Observer".
According to Hoollywood Science magazine, it was "the best speech ever in a science fiction movie".
David Bowie wrote in his message for his brother's funeral, "You see what we can't imagine, but these moments will fade away like tears in the rain."
This simple monologue was not written in the script. After actor Hal took over the script, he revised the original script twice. After obtaining the consent of the director team, the original content was added on the eve of shooting.
"lost...in time,like..tears...in the rain"
This section, known as "Tears in the Rain", was his final revision.
In the documentary "Dangerous Days: Making Blade Runner", they describe the scene of the shooting this way.
"All the staff at the filming site stood up and applauded, and some even cried on the spot."
This line, which has been changed again and again, is finally sublimated through the actor's own understanding. Through the changes of three versions, Hal touched the proposition at the beginning of the birth of science fiction in the most concise and elegant way.
About man, about creation, about human nature.
- "One Shadow, Seven Versions", the modified masterpiece
"It's hard to come by," a term that doesn't seem to apply to many of the films released. But for Blade Runner, which has gone through seven editions, hard times are the right words to describe it.
After the filming ended, Ridley was still hesitant about the choice between the film's narration and the finale. Adjustments and modifications around these two have also become the main aspects of the seven version adjustments.
"Blade Runner" is a hardcore sci-fi movie with a pivotal position in the history of sci-fi movies. When it was released in theaters in 1982, it suffered both box-office word-of-mouth failures.
In addition to the dark background and weird makeup settings of the film itself, it is incredible. Most importantly, on the basis of the version we are seeing now, the 82-year-old version added a lot of redundant narration and happy endings, which made the movie tend to be mediocre.
And the chance to get rid of these miscellaneous narrations and happy endings came from a coincidence.
In May 1990, the first version of "Blade Runner" was screened at a film festival dedicated to 70mm works. Unexpectedly, this trial version of the original tape was very popular with fans, and the swarms of ticket buyers lined up from the entrance of the theater to the end of the street.
So the original studio saw an opportunity to release a new version and asked Ridley to edit a film without a monologue and a happy ending.
But because Ridley in 1992 was shooting other films, he had no time to take into account the editing of the film. It will authorize the filmmakers to choose and choose according to their viewing wishes. As a result, such a "director's cut version" based entirely on the wishes of the audience was born.
In that era when DV machines allowed discs to be played repeatedly, after repeated explorations, the audience of "Blade Runner" finally understood the charm of the film.
Replicants - the precursor to a dystopia
The term dystopia is the opposite of utopia, referring to a place full of ugliness and misfortune. The dystopian society refers to the proliferation of material civilization over spiritual civilization, spiritual dependence is extremely controlled by material, and the human spirit has no real freedom in a highly developed technological society.
And this description of "high tech, low life" is also the generalization of cyberpunk by William Ford Gibson, the father of cyberpunk.
The life picture of extreme class opposition is reflected in "Blade Runner". On one side, the crowds in the dark alleys are struggling to survive; on the other side is the luxurious life of the owner in the spacious space on the top floor of Terry Company.
In "The Cultural Logic of Late Capitalism", Frederick Jameson argues that cyberpunk fiction "is the best literary expression of late capitalism itself".
In terms of spatiality, “cyberpunk novels acutely capture the relative disappearance of the nation-state as described above, as well as the total slaughter of society by capital.”
In the society constructed by "Blade Runner", the pyramid-shaped Terry Company is a manifestation of totalitarianism, and at the same time it is the tomb of institutional civilization. They not only maintain the profit pursuit of the company model, but also serve as the power center to control the freedom of life and death.
This "corporate regime" is reflecting the distorted development of society under consortium politics. The boss of Terry's Company emphasizes control throughout the film —whether it's the enslavement of androids, setting a four-year limit on life in defense of centralization; or implanting assistant Rachel with real memories to make her more controllable.
This series of behaviors all indicate that "control" will become the theme of capital extremes. And cyberpunk's dystopian society is built on this extreme control.
Ironically, however, what the film attempts to break out of this social control is the creation of humans themselves.
The replicator Roy finally found the founder of the Terry Company. After being told that immortality could not be achieved, in the face of despair of life, Roy responded with revenge full of "humanity".
If there is another story logic under the main line of the movie of chasing and killing replicators, it belongs to the process of replicators' pursuit of life, which is also connected with the movie.
What we see, however, is that being a replicant with only four years of life force is still doing everything in its power, trying to extend the length of life, to refute this gratuitous control from the Creator.
On the other hand, most of the citizens at the bottom, who have a longer life span, show compromise and timidity, and acquiesce to this extreme top-down control.
In this comparison, human beings are silent because of their own escape. The androids that were created resisted because of the splendor of life.
Are androids too human-like, or are humans gradually giving up on themselves?
Perhaps as described in the dystopian description, the crowd has lost its independence from human beings under long-term control, and evolved into parasites that depend on the consortium to survive.
Perhaps this is the cautionary tale of dystopian literature, which warns us that the destination of drifting with the flow is an abyss that cannot be crossed. When we allow evil to spread, we end up being one of the victims.
"Blade Runner" clarifies the meaning of life through the mouths of replicants. The pursuit of a splendid life and the struggle for freedom should never stop.
Even if this struggle will put us in danger and give us pain, it is still better than leaving in silence.
Along with the classic monologue of "Tears in the Rain", the only "person" who tried to resist in the cyber society left. From longing for life to dying, the replicant Roy exchanged self-sacrifice and the rescue of the protagonist Deka for the replicant's "Declaration of Human Rights".
Perhaps at the end of his life, it seems that it no longer matters whether the declaration can prevent human society from sliding into the abyss he met.
After all, whether it is a bionic person or a human being, at the moment when life dies, all the meanings sought will be lost in an instant.
like tears disappearing in raindrops
Related Literature
[1] Yang Huiying, The construction of humanistic spirit in round cyberpunk novels [D], Guangxi Normal University, 2008 (04)
[2] Chen Rong, Urban Space Imagination in Cyberpunk Novels [J], Nankai Journal, 2019 (03)
[3] Yang Lu, Yang Yu, "Blade Runner": A dystopian allegory for awakening the world [J], Art Review, 2018 (15)
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