Blade Runner (1982)

Director: Ridley Scott
Writer: Hampton Fancher and David Peoples, based on the novel Do Androids Dream of Electric Sheep by Philip K. Dick
Stars: Harrison Ford, Rutger Hauer, Sean Young, Edward James Olmos, M. Emmet Walsh, Daryl Hannah, William Sanderson, Brion James, Joe Turkel and Joanna Cassidy

Index: Make It a Double.

I love it when people choose their Doubles, especially when they introduce me to new and joyous films I don’t know. James Hong had lots of opportunity to do that, as his four hundred and fifty credits go back to Dragonfly Squadron in 1953, and they’re wildly varied.

In 1974, for instance, he went from Dynamite Brothers, an Al Adamson feature, to Chinatown, then made a couple of TV movies, playing U.N. Secretary General U Thant first in The Missiles of October then a major role in Judge Dee and the Monastery Murders, a mystery set in China back in the 7th century, shot with an all Asian cast. And they’re just part of one year in a career that’s spanned seven decades and counting!

Instead, he chose the safest double thus far, picking a couple of very well known films that I’ve seen many times. I’ve even reviewed Blade Runner before, but I will happily dive in again. It’s no hardship to watch these two and I can focus more on Hong’s contributions.

He doesn’t have a particularly large role in Blade Runner but it’s a crucial one, because it’s how Roy Batty and his fellow replicants find a way to reach Eldon Tyrell, the reason they’re on Earth and in Los Angeles.

For those who don’t know the film, we’re in the future, or at least we were—this is a wildly futuristic cyberpunk take on the city of Angels in the far flung future of 2019—and replicants aren’t allowed here.

And that’s because they’re not human. They look just like us and, for the most part, act like us too, but they’re artificial beings created by the Tyrell Corporation. They’re often designed to outperform us for specific purposes, as per Tyrell’s motto—“More human than human”— but they’re developing emotions of their own so are restricted by a four year lifespan.

It’s clear that Roy Batty and his companions—Leon, Zhora and Pris—want to live past that artificially imposed threshold, quite literally a deadline, so they’ve come to Earth, risking an even earlier death, to ask Dr. Eldon Tyrell, the genius behind their brains, what can be done.

Standing in their way are the blade runners of the title, special policemen who are tasked with locating and retiring replicants on Earth, that euphemism meaning just what you think it means. After Leon murders Dave Holden, the cops bring in Rick Deckard, in the shabby form of Harrison Ford, and the chase is on.

If that makes this seem like an action movie, then I’ve probably misled you just as much as Warner Bros. did back in 1982. There is action, but it’s not what drives the film. This is a look at what it means to be human, one of the great science fiction themes, the most obvious thing preserved from Philip K. Dick’s source novel; it isn’t a particularly close adaptation otherwise.

We’re immediately set up to compare these advanced Nexus 6 generation replicants with a set of regular human characters, but it’s not at all that easy. Deckard is the best blade runner in the business but even he has to administer a test first to figure out if someone is a replicant or not. It’s called a Voight-Kampff test and it’s designed to test empathy by asking emotional questions while monitoring body responses.

When he tests a Nexus 6 replicant at Tyrell’s headquarters, it takes a hundred questions to confirm that she’s not human. In fact, Rachael is so advanced, with memories implanted from Tyrell’s niece, that she isn’t even aware that she’s a replicant, though she is working it out.

Given that it previously only took twenty or thirty questions, the one she asks Deckard has to be the key to the film: has he ever retired a human by mistake? How would he know?

The first thing that sprang to mind this time through was that my big screen TV isn’t close to being big enough. This is a film to watch on a theatre screen, the bigger the better.

The second thing was that Morgan Paull, as Dave Holden, kind of looks like Harrison Ford. There’s a strong theory, one backed up by the director, Ridley Scott, that Deckard is himself a replicant. I agree with that but I also believe that Eldon Tyrell is a replicant too, given that he’s much less emotional than his supposedly unemotional creations. That’s more of a niche theory, I admit, but it’s firmly in keeping with religious themes inherent in his temple of an office and Roy greeting his father and his god, a literal creator. The Singularity suggests that when we create intelligence beyond our own, it’ll continue that process. It’s what I see here.

Now, where’s James Hong in all this? He has a small part early in the film, as the replicants seek a way to reach Tyrell, and he fits into this futuristic L.A. of 2019 better than I do, because he’s Asian. The impeccable production design is futuristic noir, which means that there’s far more Chinese and Japanese influence on show than Hispanic. Half of it is historic, noodle bars and coolie hats, but the other half is futuristic, including genetic designers who work right off the street. Hong is one of those, his speciality being eyes. He designed the Nexus 6’s eyes.

We meet him in his cold room, surrounded by tanks of liquid nitrogen, all wrapped up in a huge coat connected to heating tubes. He has a long wispy moustache, wears goggles with a loupe attachment and speaks in both Japanese and English, so well we can’t tell which counts as his native tongue. He’s wonderful and so is the scene in which Roy and Leon pressure him into giving up information. “Yes, questions.”

Of course, while Ford and Hong and so many other members of the cast are wonderful, this being incredibly good casting, Rutger Hauer is beyond that. Louis Gossett, Jr. won the Oscar for Best Supporting Actor for An Officer and a Gentleman, but Hauer was better. He’s tasked with being more human than human, hardly a trivial task; he meets and kills his god, displays emotions he shouldn’t have as he’s now more than his programming; and delivers what may be the best final words in film history, and he nails all of it gloriously. He was robbed.

So were the set designers, who benefitted a great deal from the seven months when they worked but the rest of the crew was on strike. Gandhi, which won, was great but it isn’t close. And so was Vangelis, whose score lost to E.T.

Every time I see this film, it gets better and it’s now at the very top of the tree for me, as the greatest science fiction film ever made. So I guess I should thank James Hong for sending me through it one more time!