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TV & Film

Blade Runner

Hemal Jhaveri August 29, 2023

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This week on Ten Movies:

Though some of his other roles are more iconic, ‘Blade Runner’ is perhaps Harrison Ford’s most celebrated movie, at least in the world of genre films. Which, of course, made his career and has since gone on to entirely swallow contemporary cinema.

But unlike Star Wars or Indiana Jones, Blade Runner is not a beloved franchise suitable for additional revenue generation in the form of lunchboxes and animated spinoffs. It’s dark, claustrophobic, and confusing; a slow-paced futuristic neo-noir with a synthesizer score so heavy-handed you’ll feel like one of those Raymond Chandler private eyes that are always getting hit in the back of the head and left in an alley.

Though produced in the long-ago era of 1982, ‘Blade Runner’ depicts the grimy, corporate-owned, neon-drenched Los Angeles of the not-so-distant future. Technically, the story takes place a few years ago, but that seemed far off when they made the movie, and the actual year 2019 came and went without moon colonies or outlaw cyborgs. Speaking of which, Harrison Ford spends the movie hunting down these rogue “replicants”, but – refreshingly! – his success is as much a matter of luck as of skill, and their deaths seem tragic, rather than badass. In the end, he realizes some stuff about our shared humanity.

Brian and Hemal both enjoyed the film, though they admitted that, like ‘The Empire Strikes Back’ from earlier in the season, its legacy is such that it’s hard to take it on its terms and just watch it as a movie. While ‘Blade Runner’ did not come to dominate popular culture in the fashion of Star Wars, its legacy in science fiction film and storytelling is just as significant.

 

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Hemal Jhaveri

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