The Art and Beauty of Blade Runner

This article was published last year, but due to its enduring popularity I’ve moved it to the front page for those of you who haven’t seen it yet. 

Blade Runner is one of the most visually haunting and memorable movies in the history of cinema. It has inspired art, and is a work of art. It’s a movie I can’t stop watching and talking about. This article, as such, is an indulgence for those like me who can’t help but go back to this classic neo-noir again and again.

The first picture embedded in this article, below, gave me the excuse to write this. This piece of fan art, depicting one of the many iconic moments of the movie, spurred me to start looking at what else the collective consciousness of the internet had to offer on this matter. Now, I’ve seen a lot of Blade Runner art over the years, but this time when I fell down the Google rabbit-hole I found myself spiralling through pages upon pages of remarkable imagery.

I found the following at a site that has a bunch of cool homages to classic movies.

Ridley Scott said that while making Blade Runner he tried to create beauty, frame by frame, shot by shot. It’s hard to disagree. The film is stunning and retains its power to inspire 35 years later.

 

 

 

 

 

 

I continue to be struck by still shots from the movie. Nearly all are perfect in their composition, in the use of light, shadow, smoke, and sweat to create the terrible beauty of the Blade Runner universe. The use of smoke, in particular, remains true to the purest of noir sensibilities. The first picture of Rachel below is actually a painting, and you should click on the image to enlarge and have a closer look (the artist of which can be found here).

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

Futurist Syd Mead did much of the design work for Blade Runner. ‘Futurist’ is a pretty foolish thing to call oneself, all things considered, as predicting what the world will look like fifty years away is bloody hard. And no matter how much you do get right, you’ll always have some wit declaring “yeah – so where are my flying cars?”

Mead’s art, which you can see a selection of here, feels very retro-future these days. And some of it looks like a brain explosion, as evidenced by these motorbike turtles:

Yet, yet, yet, this is also the man responsible for the aesthetics of Star Trek: The Motion Picture, Aliens, and TRON. The original Star Trek doesn’t stand the test of time, but the Tron visuals are iconic and Aliens is, well, another landmark of science fiction cinema.

For Aliens he designed the dropship and the power loader Ripley uses at the end. Of course, the recently departed H R Giger was the visionary behind the aliens themselves. Think about that for a moment: Aliens had the both the artist who imaged the aliens, plus the artist behind Blade Runner working on the same film.

At 80, Syd is apparently still in demand, doing much of the design work on Elysium, for example. (which, while not quite getting there as a story, nonetheless has some stunning visuals).

When Ridley Scott got Syd on board with Blade Runner, he said to him: “…this is not Logan’s Run, where everything is slick and clean. It’s going to be gritty, noir style.”

Good advice, given how embarrassingly Logan’s Run – made about a year before Blade Runner – has aged. It also counts as the right advice given to the right visionary. Mead not only went dark, he had – it has been said by many a fan of his work – the genetic coding of Japanese culture in his designs. This Asian influence is one of the visually distinctive aspects of the movie that helps it retain its aesthetic prescience.

 

Every detail in the movie was micro-managed by Ridley Scott. He infamously fired one of his design staff when they didn’t give him enough coffee cups to choose from to use as a prop in one of the scenes.

But this exactness with detail is also one of the reasons the movie has such longevity. Deckard’s gun, for example, is one of the coolest sidearms in science fiction history. 

The Blade Runner gun was made from a double trigger bolt action rifle and a pistol. The propmakers cut the barrel and the stock from the gun, added the curved grip from a pistol, then stuck some LEDs on the side (sorry to ruin the magic for you with these details). The weapon weighed twice that of a normal handgun and actually fired .44 magnum ammunition (which, for the uninitiated, is a large calibre). So yes, Harrison Ford was actually firing a sawn-off rifle during those fight scenes.

 

 

 

 

As you may have gathered, Scott was something of a bastard during filming. He and the star, Harrison Ford, apparently had a very difficult relationship. The pictures below aren’t art, as such, but capture perfectly the friction between the two.

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

The beauty Ridley sought for the film extended to the replicants, who were remarkable physical specimens (let’s all agree to overlook Leon on this point).

The physicality of Rutger Hauer, in particular, was sublime:

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

Details, such extraordinary details in this movie. Take this street scene, for example. Now, it seems counter-intuitive to say the future depicted in a movie could seem ‘authentic,’ but this scene must come close. Click on the picture to enlarge:

Given Ridley firmly rooted the philosophy and look his work in noir, a pulp treatment was inevitable. The following two covers by fans are the best examples of this. I could not find the artist of the one on the right, but the one of the left has a cool site that gives a number of films the pulp makeover.

The movie even inspired Anders Ramsell to paint 3285 water colour prints, and then turn those into a remarkable short film. You can watch it here on YouTube.

Some critics have quibbled over the story of Blade Runner – saying the narrative is flawed and confusing. They are wrong, of course, and should all be punished with repeated viewings of Prometheus so they know what a flawed narrative actually looks like (interestingly, there are credible theories floating around that suggest Prometheus and Blade Runner take place in the same universe, linking the Weyland and Tyrell corporations. Which means Blade Runner and Alien are linked. Mind blown).

But no critic, no matter how obtuse, bloviating, drunk, or working for Rupert Murdoch, has ever said that Blade Runner was anything but a visual masterpiece. There’s not a shot in the film that doesn’t hold up to scrutiny today, and there’s many an artist that still draws inspiration from the film for their own work.

Many authors too, for that matter, who when then try to imagine the setting for their near-future dystopia, sit down and re-watch Blade Runner in order to feed the muse. I should know, I’m one of them.

 

 

Email: Voight0Kampff (AT) gmail.com.

Twitter:  @DarklingEarth