Nobody wanted Blade Runner.
1982’s box office belonged to E.T. and Rocky III. Audiences shrugged when the dark, dour Blade Runner hit theaters; even the critics who gawped at the film’s baroque visuals tore apart everything else. “Science-fiction devotees may find Blade Runner a wonderfully meticulous movie and marvel at the comprehensiveness of its vision,” Janet Maslin wrote in the New York Times—before pointing out it was “a film that special effects could have easily run away with, and run away with it they have,” and sniping at director Ridley Scott for expecting “overdecoration to carry a film that has neither strong characters nor a strong story.”
Scott felt differently. “Sometimes the design is the statement,” he insisted in Paul M. Sammon’s 1996 book Future Noir: The Making of Blade Runner. Thirty-five years after Blade Runner’s release, he’s been proven right. Over the decades, the film—which owes as much to noir as it does to science-fiction—has ossified into an endlessly examined, endlessly debated classic, with complexities that reveal themselves incrementally, viewing after viewing. It’s the kind of film whose hero, Deckard (Harrison Ford), is so morally corrupt that he might, in fact, be the villain, and the sort of film whose villain, Roy Batty (Rutger Hauer), is so full-hearted and humane that he might, in fact, be the hero. (“Technology isn’t a villain,” said visual futurist Syd Mead, one of Blade Runner’s concept artists, in a 1982 interview with Starlog. “Even in our movie, the robot replicants are actually people.”)
But looming above everything else in Blade Runner are those visuals. Scott’s then-remarkable vision of a culture-mashed, corporation-ruled Los Angeles—drenched in rain and soaked in neon, its air heavy with shadows and cigarette smoke—has only grown more resonant, seeping into popular consciousness and spawning countless homages, ripoffs, and subgenres.
Which explains how, in 2017, we’ve ended up with a film that, in 1982, would have been inconceivable: Blade Runner 2049, which stars Ryan Gosling and features Ford, who’s now on the third leg of the greatest hits tour he began with Indiana Jones and the Kingdom of the Crystal Skull and Star Wars: The Force Awakens. On the upside, 2049 comes with some heavy-duty talent: brilliant director Denis Villeneuve (who crafted a sci-fi classic of his own with 2016’s Arrival), unparalleled cinematographer Roger Deakins, and Hampton Fancher, one of Blade Runner’s original screenwriters. On the downside, 2049 also features Jared Leto, who is a bad actor who should not be allowed to act.
