Number 10: Blade Runner (1982)

Just look at that picture. How can a movie with that image not be great?

Harrison Ford.

Harrison is probably my favorite actor of all time. And not just because he has two last names. He is a modern day Bogey who managed to carve out his own persona somewhere in there. What is that persona? I dunno. It is unique, thus difficult to describe relative to other known quantities. He is Indiana, he is a drag racer, he is Rick Deckard, and yet somehow these are all very much Harrison Ford.

As Rick Deckard, he is a rarity: a somewhat mediocre character. It isn’t that Rick has no talent or nothing to say, but he isn't brilliant. He is working; here he does something well, there he does something kind of stupid, then he is just plain outwitted by the superior intellect of Roy Batty.

Replicants are supposedly smarter than humans, but instead of experiencing awe, we mostly wonder how it could be otherwise—humanity, ostensibly represented by Rick Deckard, doesn’t seem so great (or so bad). Outwitting us shouldn’t be hard. But then, does Rick represent humanity? Unicorns seem to indicate otherwise.

And Harrison channels all this complexity with the dry, wiseacre act of a tough-guy hawkshaw, ready to get beat up at a moment’s notice. Could anyone else have played this role?

It Seems Real.

What must have seemed marvelously futuristic in 1982 seems eerily realistic today. The dark, rainy, cramped sets contrasted with dark, rainy, empty sets seem anything but futuristic. We wonder how a society could be unable to move its elbows while broken down, empty apartment buildings persist, but isn’t that our experience far too often? Luxurious pyramids of the rich overlook dank locales which, it seems, were abandoned by most of humanity as it went “off-world”.

There are flying cars, of course. But outside of that poetic license, Blade Runner could very well be… today. Our climate hasn’t quite reached such drastic levels of decay (and we still appear to have sunny days, though in Pittsburgh, that is always questionable), but the dueling diseases of abandonment and overcrowding, so seemingly contradictory yet so coexistent, are as evident in our society as they are in Blade Runner.

Edward James Olmos

The movies gets points just for casting him, and double points for putting him into such a felicitous role.

Up Next: Seven is Nine

(Note, I am going to starting putting these out bi-weekly [Sunday and Wednesday], as it has to occurred to me that a) they are all written, so why go slowly and b) otherwise I'll be publishing them from Amsterdam.)

~Right Thumb~