The fifth and final cut of Ridley Scott’s 1982 science fiction classic, Blade Runner, comes out this week in a variety of overstuffed DVD packages. Anyone interested in the film should read Gary Giddin’s very eloquent New York Sun piece on the film’s somewhat awkward juxtaposition of marvelous visuals and clunky storytelling. He gets the otherworldly quality of Scott’s compositions just right:

Every inch of the screen is answered for, indoors and especially outdoors, as horizons disappear into matte paintings, smoke pots, shimmering neon, giant screens, airborne vehicles, and crowds as opaque and variously dressed as in a Halloween parade in Greenwich Village. From the justly celebrated opening shot — a grotesque metropolitan hell with fireballs shooting into the starless night — we are drawn into an alternate world.

Giddin comes down hard on the story (maybe too hard), saying the script and characterizations “suggest directorial incompetence,” but his basic point stands: Blade Runner succeeds on the power of its meticulously created world. It’s a triumph of visual ingenuity that, even in the age of limitless CGI possibility, few films can match.

More than that, however, the film is a landmark because of how it opened up the genre of cinematic science fiction. Much science fiction, especially the low-grade junk that flourished in the decade before Blade Runner hit the screen, was cheap, rough, and carelessly assembled. That’s not to say that none of it was enjoyable in some adolescent way, but it was hardly serious; even the best efforts (Star Wars) rarely transcended their pulp origins.

Blade Runner, though imperfect, sought to be something more, something grand and thoughtful, and if its fraught production process (exhaustively detailed in Paul Sammon’s book, Future Noir) resulted in a less-than-focused final product, its outsized ambitions, and the talent behind them, were always completely clear. In the end, simply looking as stunning as it did was enough of an accomplishment, for it gave the often raw and jagged science fiction genre permission to be something more than a juvenile stomping ground—to be haunting, elegant, and yes, even beautiful.

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This entry was posted on Tuesday, December 18th, 2007 at 5:49 PM and is filed under The Horizon. You can follow any responses to this entry through the RSS 2.0 feed. You can leave a response, or trackback from your own site.