While I’m going on about old movies, today I’m re-watching Blade Runner again. The original one, from 1982, directed by Ridley Scott and based on the book by Philip K Dick. It stars Harrison Ford, still looking fairly young, as this was only five years on from the original Star Wars.
It is a very dark movie, but it’s so well done that it’s absolutely engrossing. In 1982 some of those scenes must have been quite mind boggling. In fact many of them still are.
The movie is full of classic quotes. They are not so much quotes as samples now, because they have since appeared in music videos and other movies. Classic lines like Leon the replicant saying “Let me tell you about my mother” are right up there with Dirty Harry asking “Do you feel lucky, punk?”
One of the final scenes, Rutger Hauer's final monologue, has been described as "perhaps the most moving death soliloquy in cinematic history".
It was set in what must have seemed like a bleak distant future back in 1982 - 2019. A scary dark future world. The scariest thing about 2019 from the current viewpoint of 2025, is that we now look back to it as the last year of a sort happy innocent pre-covidhoax era, before everything got well and truly screwed up.
Predictably the more recent sequel staring Ryan Gossling, “Blade Runner 2049” (2017) by comparison, is unimaginative, slow moving, boring, and depressing. It’s not so much that it’s particularly bad if it was an original stand alone movie, but the big issue is that it copies every last detail from the original, and brings almost nothing new to the table.
In 35 years it seems to have not moved forward a single day from the vision of the future from 1982. So it’s a sad letdown compared with the amazing original.
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