Blade Runner and the 5 Stages of Grief

It was Saturday and I was standing in front of a marquee that read Blade Runner: The Director's Cut. The line in front of the Rio Theatre snaked halfway around the block. Everyone, myself included, was nervously glancing ahead at the box office, anxious to see if they would make the cut and nab a seat. Although I might be projecting because I hadn't bought my ticket in advance. I'd clearly underestimated the city's appetite.

I was so excited to finally see Blade Runner. Despite my reputation as a certified Ridley Scott hater, I wanted to give him a fair shake. I was hoping that his 1982 classic would be an exception to my "rule." Throughout my life, it was just one of those movies I avoided simply because one too many people had told me that I had to watch it. That it was amazing. That it would change my life.

I've never liked being told what to do. But I couldn't avoid the influence of the film. It created a genre-defining world and has permanently reshaped the landscape of sci-fi. Film buffs quote Roy Batty and endlessly discuss the significance of the origami unicorn. Even though I've never seen the movie, its mythology, and its legendary status, was well established in my mind. I had heard tell of the amazing neo-noir cyberpunk visuals and the mind-bending breakdown of what it means to be human. When I saw that there was a screening at my local cinema, I couldn't pass it up. Enough was enough. Finally, I had to see it

My anticipation grew with each small step towards the front of the line. Despite a few line-budgers who I silently cursed in my head, I finally got my ticket, grabbed my popcorn, and took a seat. And not a moment too soon. As I sat back a hush quite literally fell over the crowd. I was grinning like a little kid. I was going to experience Blade Runner the way it was meant to be seen. In a packed theatre, training my full attention to the story on screen. The next two hours was one of the wildest emotional rollercoasters I've ever been on, but not the kind the filmmaker intended.

Denial

It started out just fine. Sweeping visuals, soaring Vangelis score, a world torn apart by consumerism, overpopulation and ecological destruction. A dystopian, dingy L.A. inhabited by the remnants of humanity. I settled back in my seat, ready to be swept away. But only a minute in, the cracks started to show.

From the moment Harrison Ford appeared, something felt off, and not just with him. Much has been written about Rick Deckard, and how his wooden delivery and stilted interactions with the denizens of 2019 L.A. is actually a calculated choice, designed to blur the lines between human and Replicant. Except that everyone in the film behaves the same way, Replicant or not. Every line is flat, every look, unimpressed. There's dry and then there's Saharan. In this world, it's almost impossible to tell humans from the genetically engineered. To me, that means the machines should behave like humans, not the other way around.

Unable to connect with Deckard, or anyone else on screen, I floated, unmoored through the beginning of the film. In the back of my mind, creeping in like a sickness was the feeling that is every cinephile's wort nightmare: boredom. As the opening scenes ticked by, I kept waiting for a moment, just a moment where I could latch onto Deckard. Or Leon. Even Bryant. Anyone.

I tried to push through my wariness. This was Blade Runner. Everyone agrees that it's a masterpiece. There had to be some reason for this strange detachment. Deckard spends the whole movie longing for connection, lost in the endless ennui of existence. I had to be patient. All would be revealed in time. I waited for the narrative turn that would uncover the real character hiding under Harrison Ford's ice-cold exterior. But it never came.

Anger

As his hunt for the four fugitive Replicants intensified, so did my confusion. The visit to Tyrell, to the proverbial Creator, had to yield some answers. Except it didn't. Rachel then, she had to be the key at the centre of the film. A Replicant who thinks she's human, the woman who forces the audience to ask, "Where is the line between object and being?" Except when we finally meet her, I thought I must have misunderstood. Of course she's a Replicant. Why else would she speak like that, react like that, be treated like that. After her Voigt-Kampff test and the big "reveal" I was so frustrated that I forgot to be swept away by the questions of consciousness, of memory, and of agency. How could I be? It felt like I was watching cardboard cutouts pantomime humanity. Empty and emotionless monologues clogged the runtime, and world-altering revelations were taken in with no more than a shrug. I don't need high drama, I was just longing for some indication that what I was watching mattered to the characters. Instead, discussions about the meaning of consciousness were carried out with stone-faced indifference. I found my mind drifting away, trying to remember if I had left the stove on.

Bargaining

I just had to be missing something. This couldn't be all that Blade Runner was. Intro to philosophy wearing a neon coat? No. I mean, Roy Batty is great. Truly unsettling. Maybe the answer was J. F. Sebastian, the genetic engineer, turned overlord to all his twisted creations. But every time the film gave me hope, it snatched it away just as quickly. Back to Deckard. Back to his weirdly stunted confrontation with Rachel where he apparently shatters her reality and begins to question his own. But I didn't buy it. Everything here was wrong. Not a genuine drop of feeling to be found. The "love story" at the center of the whole thing isn't just abusive, it's flat. Deckard treats her with all the tender love and care of a child throwing around a ragdoll. If I was supposed to be invested in the romance, something was very amiss.

Deckard doesn't come to see Rachel's humanity, he doesn't see the error of his ways. He sees an object that he can force to become the vessel and the cure for everything that he hates about his own life. I don't particularly care if he's a Replicant, the emotional core of the movie is rotten, whether he has the capacity for empathy or not. But when even your director and lead actor can't agree on whether the character is human—literally decades after the fact—are we really surprised that the metaphors are mixed?

Depression

Well, he's doing what he came to do, I guess. As Deckard picked off Leon and Zhora, the film was doing everything it could to tell me that Deckard was beginning to question what he had dedicated his life to. Sure. Whatever. You can show me as many scenes of him sadly drowning cocktails as you want, that doesn't mean that I have to buy it. Even when Deckard assaults Rachel and forces an "I love you" from her lips, I could barely muster disgust. By now, the moral greyness of Blade Runner was so blurry I wasn't even totally sure what it wanted me to be rooting for.

To me, it never feels like Deckard changes at all. At the beginning of the movie he's retired, beaten down, washed up, cynical. He's still all of those things by the end, just with a few broken fingers and a girl he has traumatized so badly that she feels like she has to stay with him. Honestly, it feels more like a horror story. If there wasn't a flat refusal by the entire creative team to give Rachel even an ounce of characterization, I might say that it was clever. But no. She just stumbles from scene to scene, showing up when it's convenient to the story and utterly vanishing when it's not.

Acceptance

By the third act, I was solidly disillusioned, resigned to waiting out the movie until the credits. The great Blade Runner before me, and I was checking my proverbial watch. I couldn't tell if I was more disappointed with the movie or myself.

I will say, once I let go of trying to like the movie, I enjoyed the experience a lot more. The turn in the final act to straight-horror film was a nice change of pace, and heavily featured the only character I found I was eventually able to give a shit about. Even I'm not going to say that Blade Runner has no redeeming qualities, and Rutger Hauer is at the top of the list.

His final confrontations with both Tyrell and Deckard are supremely unsettling, and he's the only one giving a performance that doesn't feel like it was forced out of him at gunpoint. His monologue at the end of the film is genuinely iconic, and it manages to encapsulate everything the movie has been trying (and failing) to say for the past hour and a half. And then, he died, and took with him the last vestiges of hope that I had of actually enjoying myself.

Deckard comes home to find Rachel waiting. They flee the city to some as-yet-unknown fate. There's the origami unicorn. Did Gaff see Deckard's dream? Is he human or is he machine? I don't really care, because not once did I care about him. At the end of the movie, everyone else in the theatre started clapping. All I could do was roll my eyes. For a movie all about the meaning of humanity, Blade Runner didn't have much to speak of.

Truly, this was one of the most disappointing viewing experiences that I can remember. I wantedto love this film. So much so that halfway through, I was still trying to convince myself that there was some hidden genius that I just couldn't see. But it falls victim to many of the same issues that have plagued Scott's other work. Style and scale trump character at every turn, and the film is too caught up in its own brilliance to provide an arc for its central protagonist. Maybe I put too much pressure on the film. I was expecting something life-changing, and instead I got mind-numbing. When something that has been discussed to the lengths that Blade Runner has, it's hard to really form your own opinion. It is unquestionably influential, has inspired countless stories, art pieces, books and Master's theses. I'm not here to say that we should delete the movie from the canon. But for all its acclaim, I expected more.

When I sit down to watch a movie I want it to transport me to a different reality. I want it to make me think. But most importantly, I want it to make me feel. And with Blade Runner, I came up empty. Honestly, watching the movie felt more like an academic exercise than a piece of art. I can read about the meaning behind Blade Runner anytime, I chose to watch it because I thought that it would offer me a way to connect to the story's central question. "What makes someone human?" it asks. It certainly spent enough time telling me. I just wish that it had shown me as well.