SCI-FI PIONEER
Ten things you probably didn’t know about Blade Runner — in honour of the screening of Ridley Scott’s Final Cut,
Time is catching up with Blade Runner.
Ridley Scott’s sci-fi noir thriller about a disgruntled Los Angeles lawman (Harrison Ford) hunting murderous android “replicants” has gained fans and status since its troubled 1982 debut.
Famously panned by Siskel and Ebert and repeatedly tweaked thereafter by Scott, this dystopian view of a future L.A. of rain, neon and gloom has endured to influence many other sci-fi creations, from The Matrix to
Ex Machina( which opens April 24 in Toronto).
We draw closer to Blade Runner with each passing year, as our calendar starts to sync with the film’s timetable.
It’s set in November 2019, just over four years away, but the “incept” (birth) dates for the renegade replicants begin early in 2016.
And the time is now for the film at TIFF Bell Lightbox, where Blade
Runner: The Final Cut — Scott’s apparently ultimate and absolutely glorious latest vision — screens Thursday and Friday and again Tuesday (details at tiff.net). The Final Cut fixes narrative and technical tangles, and brightens and sharpens scenes and characters.
In honour of the occasion, here are 10 Strange Things You Probably Didn’t Know About Blade Runner:
1. Be very afraid: We’re now less than nine months away from the incept date of Roy (Rutger Hauer), leader of the four killer replicants stalked by Ford’s Rick Deckard. Roy’s incept date is Jan. 8, 2016. The others are Pris (Daryl Hannah), Feb. 14, 2016; Zhora (Joanna Cassidy), June 12, 2016; and Leon (Brion James), April 10, 2017. 2. Ridley Scott’s vision of a 2019 Los Angeles with major Asian influences has proven prophetic in light of immigration and globalization trends since 1982.
But he wasn’t much of a weatherman — the perpetual rain of four years hence seems highly unlikely, given that California is enduring a major and lengthy drought. 3. Rick Deckard is seen reading a newspaper (hooray!) with a headline about farming on the moon. This may have seemed remotely possible in ’82, just a decade past the last of the Apollo lunar missions. But the moon has been all but forgotten by NASA since the 1970s, and that’s not going to change soon. 4. The prop-blaster gun used by Deckard in the film made headlines when it sold for between $100,000 (U.S.) and $150,000 at a Hollywood auction in 2009. But to many fans, the real Holy Grail of the film is the futuristic bottle of Johnny Walker Black drained by the whiskey-loving Deckard. Resembling space-age Listerine bottles, only a few were made and none remain in the wild; well-heeled collectors snapped them all up. 5. Deckard’s love interest, Rachael, (Sean Young) is often seen smoking a cigarette, both in the film and also on the oft-imitated poster created by the late, great artist John Alvin. Rachael’s tobacco habit now makes the poster illegal in France, of all places, which since 2007 has had a law “prohibiting all direct or indirect advertising” for tobacco or alcohol in most public venues. Deckard’s gun is still OK, though. 6. Many of the companies seen on neon signs throughout the film — including Pan Am, Coca-Cola, Cuisinart, RCA, Atari and Bulova — either went out of business or experienced major turbulence after being seen in Blade Runner. Many fans believe the film to be an anti-capitalism curse of sorts, probably because mere coincidence sounds too boring. 7. The red pill that the smiling geisha is seen eating in one of the neon advertising signs is supposed to be a birth control pill, according to official lore. But it could also retroactively be viewed as the “red pill” of The Matrix, released in 1999, which frees the user from computer-generated reality and returns them to the real world. Deckard and Rachael are in need of a “red pill” of their own to escape their violent and gloomy existence. 8. There won’t be flying “spinner” cars or nearly human androids by 2019, but technology is right on track for the voice-operated computer that Deckard uses to analyze a suspect’s photo. Right now, Apple’s Siri helper is about as smart as a precocious preschooler, but four years from now it will probably be a lot more useful. 9. In a Toronto Star interview in 2011, Rutger Hauer said he couldn’t care less if he plays a good guy in a film or a villain like the Blade Runner replicant Roy he’s celebrated for: “I don’t care if I play a rapist or a pedophile. We don’t shoot people, we shoot movies. Movies are stories. We tell stories. It’s not us. I’m not trying to make a personal statement here.” 10. Ridley Scott told the Star in a 2006 interview that he couldn’t envision making a Blade Runner sequel because the film’s ending didn’t suggest a followup.
But that sequel is going to happen after all, directed by Canada’s Denis Villeneuve and starring a considerably older Harrison Ford, who at 72 is reportedly on the mend following a crash of his vintage aircraft in March. The sequel is due in 2017 and actress Joanna Cassidy, who plays one of the renegade replicants, recently said she’d love to reprise her role, but this time as a human version of her character, Zhora.