Film
Blade Runner Double Bill
- Director
- Denis Villeneuve, Ridley Scott
- Certificate
- 15
- Running Time
- 311 mins
A double dose of Blade Running, with a 30 minute break between films to give your bottom a break.
Ridley Scott’s stylish, hugely influential adaptation of the great Philip K. Dick’s Do Androids Dream of Electric Sheep? presents a seductively bustling, rainswept futuristic LA cityscape that was to cast a long shadow over the SF genre.
It’s 2019, and world-weary former cop Deckard (Harrison Ford) is bullied by his former boss into tracking down and eliminating a bunch of ‘replicants’ who’ve escaped from an off-world colony. So well developed are the replicants that only the most sophisticated techniques can distinguish them from humans. Indeed, one of their number, Rachael (Sean Young), is a new variety developed by the Tyrell Corporation who’s been implanted with a set of false memories and genuinely believes herself to be human. The replicants’ leader Roy Batty (Rutger Hauer) is more concerned with tracking down his creator to discover his own termination date. The film’s noirish tone is enhanced by Vangelis’s haunting score, and it packs an emotional punch not normally associated with the genre, especially in Batty’s valedictory speech. Blade Runner has also generated its own mythology thanks to the script’s vagueness about the number of replicants on the loose, prompting speculation that Deckard himself may be one of their number. Not to be confused with the Director’s Cut (over which, ironically, Scott had no control), this 2007 ‘Final Cut’ version of the film includes the full, fanboy-delighting unicorn dream sequence.
Set 30 years after the original film, Arrival director Denis Villeneuve‘s Blade Runner 2049 casts Ryan Gosling as LAPD officer K, a new blade runner who uncovers some kind of terrible secret. To prevent catastrophe, he must now track down Rick Deckard, (Harrison Ford) who’s been missing for three decades. Jared Leto takes the bad guy role this time and the whole thing clocks in at two-and-a-half hours.
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