I still have to see Blade Runner. ducks away
Well now I'm quite motivated to have a #scificlub on this. What say people?
It may not be for you. My wife is not a fan, despite having gone as Pris for halloween one year. The tricky part is the movie does gain from having voiceover, but the voiceover we ended up with was the one Harrison Ford did terribly on purpose in order to buy time while the latest producer-in-charge spun out and got fired (the gambit failed). To really appreciate it you have to watch two or three different versions and that gets tiresome if you aren't a die hard fan.
I feel like it's such a cultural cornerstone / Patient Zero that it deserves me at least giving it a try sometime. What other redeeming qualities does it have? I honestly don't know. I can probably tolerate Grumpy Ford. Whenever the story and characters matter in a movie, I usually turn on the closed captions just to make sure I don't miss stuff. Watching films as ESL isn't as easy as might seem. Sidenote about that: House of Cards is an example of a mix / line delivery that is perfect for ESL. The sentences and character names that mattered were always clearly enunciated without much background noise. Less important lines (e.g. policy debates) could be rambly or have people talking in the background, but the parts that matter always got emphasized. Even my parents could understand most of it without subtitles.
British version or Netflix version? I gave the first season of the Netflix version a try; David Fincher just wears me out because he hates people so much. I think it's difficult to separate Blade Runner from its cultural milieu. It did not do well at the box office, yet in backwater New Mexico there were TV ads celebrating trivia prizes for people who went to see it five, ten, twenty times. It was a Syd Mead future, an Enki Bilal future, not a Ralph McQuarrie future and since then, the tide has turned. Realistically speaking, the Replicants born in an impossible future back in 1982 are alive now. It's also more of a gestalt work than a lot of films. You can watch Chinatown for the dialogue and plot. You can watch Star Wars for the SFX and one-liners. So much of Blade Runner is non-diagetic, though - not just the audio, but a lot of the visuals. It's halfway to being a Peter Greenaway film. I think you have to have lived through the Cold War to really grok Gibson's Neuromancer. And I think you had to have seen the Sparkly '70s collapse into the Dirty '80s to truly appreciate Blade Runner. Unfortunately, lots of critics and cultural writers were right there with it so that's the only perspective you get. Alien was, in many ways, a parable for the coal closures in '70s UK. It's still a hell of a horror film but... I mean, you lose a lot of the impact of Wizard of Oz if you don't know who William Jennings Bryan was. Blade Runner was too busy fleeing its own failure to really be the masterpiece it could have been, and without really understanding where it comes from, it becomes just another overrated sci fi film.
