Word: bladeful
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...ANGELES in 2019 presents few surprises Traffic trangles are thicker and constant rain has replaced the smog, but a skeletal Bradford building still towers over a freakish mob in the high-tech skyline of Blade Runner. Not that the skyline appears very often in Ridley Scott's latest sci-fi film. The director instead focuses on crowded halls and packed rooms, using flying billboards and continuous drizzle to further enclose the outdoor scenes. The atmosphere is stifling; this future world is a cage...
...paranoia conveyed by Blade Runner's setting should argument the film's theme: The enemy has infiltrated our society and cannot be distinguished from us. This premise, which worked so well in Invasion of the Body Snatchers, fails miserably here. The dazzling effects and set are the entire movie; plot and characterization are virtually nonexistent. Scott, director of Alien, should know how to make believable sci-fi by now. For Blade Runner, he teamed with special effects magician Douglas Trumbull, of Close Encounters of the Third Kind, and the dashing Harrison Ford, star of last year's smash Raiders...
...film sets Ford, as a legal killer, or "blade runner," against the homicidal "replicates," genetically designed slaves. The replicates, laborers for colony planets, are designed with four-year life spans. Not surprisingly, some of these unfortunates resent their mortality and return to earth to meet their makers, hoping to steal the genetic secrets of their existence. The tend to kill anyone who gets in their way, which is why Ford gets called...
...Blade Runner, like its setting, is a beautiful, deadly organism that devours life; and Ford, the cockily engaging Star Warrior of Raiders of the Lost Ark, allows his heroic stature to shrivel inside it. In comparison, Hauer's silver-haired superman is more human than human, and finally more complex than Ford's victimized flatfoot. Because of this imbalance of star roles, and because this drastically recut movie has a plot that proceeds by fits and stops, Blade Runner is likely to disappoint moviegoers hoping for sleek thrills and derring-do. But as a display terminal...
...Blade Runner, an adaptation of Philip K. Dick's 1969 novel Do Androids Dream of Electric Sheep?, the here is quite enough: a vision of dark, cramped, urban squalor. This is Los Angeles in the year 2019, when most of the earth's inhabitants have colonized other planets, and only a polyglot refuse heap of humanity remains. Los Angeles is a Japanized nighttown of sleaze and silicon, fetid steam and perpetual rain. This baroque Tomorrowland juggles images from a dozen yesterdays: walk out of the rain and into a 1940s world of overhead fan blades and women...