In Search Of Soul
Sydney Morning Herald
Monday November 3, 1997
BLADE RUNNER - The Director's Cut: Nine, 9.30pm.
A Los Angeles multinational company, The Tyrell Corporation, manufactures life-like robots known as Replicants.
The Nexus 6 models are smarter and more personable than your average traffic lights, talking stove and answering machine. Much smarter.
They are, in fact, indistinguishable from humans except that, like Dorothy's companions on the Yellow Brick Road to Oz, they yearn for completeness ... to feel emotion, identity and soul rather than simply responding to their programs.
They have reached a stage of development that equates with the state of detached devolution attained by Steve McQueen's Frank Bullitt in the celebrated 1968 thriller.
A batch of renegades escapes from an off-world colony, returning to the megalopolis of Los Angeles in 2019.
Deckard (Harrison Ford), who is a retired, deeply cynical bounty hunter, is assigned the task of hunting down and "retiring" them - a job made more difficult when he falls for the latest prototype, Rachael, played with the digital resonance for which she is renowned by Sean Young.
It's computerised mayhem, with the sci-fi philosophy of Philip K. Dick's novel, Do Androids Dream Of Electric Sheep?, subservient to a display of FX and futuristic "product placement" for TDK, Coke, PanAm, Budweiser and Atari.
Brion James (as Leon) shows the fighting qualities of Lance Hendrik-sen in Aliens, and Rutger Hauer, as Roy Batty, teams up with Darryl Hannah as Pris - the last two Rep-licants to survive Deckard's sweep.
They show more human qualities than their flesh and blood counterparts, experiencing pity (or responding to some deep-seated program despite their renegade status). Batty actually saves Deckard's life in the cliffhanger climax before succumbing to the "death" he yearns to prevent.
His profound hunger for a soul shames the soullessness of his human foes. But then it looks as though Deckard is, himself, a Replicant.
It's a basic story done (and overdone) with great flair ... and flares, blue filters, smoke, rain and understated inferences about racial mix.
But as we scream headlong into a New World Disorder, dominated by Transglobal corporations with slender interest in humanity, the film offers plenty of depressing propositions.
© 1997 Sydney Morning Herald
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