Blade Runner (1982): The Eyes Of Reality

"I've seen things you people wouldn't believe. Attack ships on fire off the shoulder of Orion. I watched C-beams glitter in the dark near the Tannhäuser Gate. All those moments will be lost in time, like tears in rain"

The future is something humans always think about. How will it be? Will it be better? Worse? Will there be flying cars? Ridley Scott tried to give us his version of the future with Blade Runner, and it’s a very, very bleak one. 

Blade Runner is a science fiction/dystopic/cyberpunk/tech-noir film loosely based on Do Androids Dream of Electric Sheep? by Philip K. Dick and directed by Ridley Scott. Set in 2019, the films deals with the hunting of androids created by the Tyrell Corporation known as replicants by the hard-boiled cop Rick Deckard (Harrison Ford).

Blade Runner is considered one of the most important science fiction movies in the history of cinema and it’s one of my favorites movies ever. BR shows a very depressive world; a place dominated by ads, neon lights, bright colors, advanced technology, tall buildings, flying vehicles, but also crime, discrimination, inequality, and hatred. A dystopia, and a critique on how the future will be.

Regarding the characters, on the one hand, we have our main character Deckard: A lonely, hard-boiled, noir-styled cop who is sent to “take out” (kill) replicants. Deckard is a man who does his job, because he has to, but when he encounters sentient robots who are afraid of death, everything changes. Should it matter that replicants suffer same as us? If they are just machines, should we be concerned about their feelings? Are their feelings and thoughts even real? Many questions arise when facing replicants. If they are sentient, are they equal? Inferior? Superior? Should they have rights? Ridley Scott doesn’t plan on answering all of these questions, but to at least invites us to think deeper about them. There are many messages inside the film, and it's up to the viewer to find and discuss them to get a deep insight about human nature and what it truly means to be human.

On the other hand, we have the replicants; synthetic humans who escaped from an off-world colony called Nexus-6 led by replicant Roy Batty (Rutger Hauer). The rest of his people are: Pris Stratton (Daryl Hannah), Zhora Salome (Joanna Cassidy) and Leon Kowalski (Brion James). Replicants seem to be cruel and cold-blooded killing machines. Why do they kill? They are dying and they are looking to survive one way or another. Is that it? Is this reason enough to justify their behavior? Is humanity to blame?

What I find interesting is the process of humanization and dehumanization that occurs to the characters. We have Deckard, the replicants, and also Rachael (Sean Young), a female replicant whom Deckard starts to fall in love with. All of them change throughout the film: 

- Deckard is becoming more inhumane and cruel, and he begins to question his mission. He "retires" replicants, because he is told to do so, but what about his feelings? Is this really what he wants? Deckard starts to act more like a replicant than the replicants themselves.

- Roy at the end shows something that we didn't expect: Empathy. Empathy is a human trait, so, why did he do "that"? Isn't he a cold-blooded killing machine? Replicants aren't supposed to be like that... Is Roy a human in the end?

- Rachael doesn't know who she is and she seeks the truth of her own nature throughout the movie. Deckard tries to help her by making her choose and act to prove she really is "human". She has feelings for Deckard, but if she is a replicant, are those feelings real? If they are, doesn't that make her as human as the rest of us?

 

Trying to answer all of these in BR with a heavy amount of visual imagery and symbolisms is hard. Even more so, because of its slow-driven narrative, obscure setting, morally ambiguous characters, oppressive atmosphere and the amazing score made by Vangelis. 

Blade Runner is a dystopia, a very dark insight into the future if we keep going through this path. At least 2019 is not that bad for us as in the film, but it is a cautionary tale that a change is needed in our society to reach towards greatness. We are humans, we live, we breathe, we love, but the more we keep going forward, the more robotic we become.

Apocalypse Now (1979): War Is Hell

"The horror... The horror..."

"War. War never changes" is a phrase we often hear. Maybe the means in which we make war are different, but in essence it hasn't changed at all. It doesn't matter the context, war is always horrifying and trying to portrait it in the big screen is challenging. Some show war as a place where heroism can take place, because freedom is on the line and there are men who are willing to make great sacrifices for their country, while others show hell; a place where there is neither honor nor salvation for people. Thankfully (?) Apocalypse Now (1979) belongs to the second category.

Apocalypse Now (1979) is a war/horror/psychological film directed by Francis Ford Coppola and starred by Marlon Brando, Robert Duvall, Martin Sheen, Frederic Forrest, Albert Hall, Sam Bottoms, Laurence Fishburne and Dennis Hopper. Loosely based on the novel Heart of Darkness by Joseph Conrad, the movie tells the story of Captain Benjamin L. Willard (Sheen) who is sent to Cambodia, Vietnam to kill American Colonel Kurtz, whom is believed to have gone rogue.

It all starts with Captain Willard, a broken man, scarred by previous battles, who aches to return to war, and his prayers are answered when he is given the mission to assassinate Colonel Kurtz, an allegedly insane traitor. The story is narrated by Willard while he travels through Cambodia with his platoon and watches all the horror during the American occupation in the country. His group is mainly composed of amateurs and young lings who do not know about war and the more they go into the wild, the crazier everything gets.

When I talk about war I try to be respectful, because war is not something really funny. We can have fun video games, book, series, comics and movies about war, but a real-life battlefield is a nightmare on Earth. I don't think it really matters which side you're on in a war, because the winning side is just that: Someone who won, and it doesn't necessarily mean that it is the right one, since losers don't get to write history. The scars that war leaves inside the body and the mind sometimes are beyond repair and AN  shows the true damage war inflicts on soldiers, the cruel things people do to survive, and how civilians whose lives got caught in the middle of it all deal with something beyond their understanding. Vietnam changes into a land in which Richard Wagner's “Ride of the Valkyries” or The Doors' "The End" accompany destruction made by helicopters, guns, grenades, and men who have welcomed insanity into their very souls.

I believe that AN is more than a war movie, since it doesn't show a lot of action compared to other war films I have watched (Hacksaw Ridge or Fury being more recent examples), but I see it more as a journey into the human soul and the horror that dwells in the hearts of men. The way Willard is an observer inside the film instead of having a more active role is really interesting and how he makes his way to Kurtz while trying to get inside his head is something I really enjoyed. Willard tries to rationalize how Colonel Kurtz, a man who had everything turned into a traitor and he doesn't really understand until he gets to him. 

Marlon Brando as Kurtz is powerful acting, considering that Kurtz just appear some minutes at the end of the film and that's it. Brando is truly a great actor by portraying Kurtz as a broken soul. Kurtz is a man who looked into the horrors of war and the human soul and understood that maybe there is no hope left for us: This will always be who we are and we don't deserve redemption. "This is the way the world ends / not with a bang but a whimper" is a fitting line for a hauntingly dark and beautiful ending. Coppola showed us a journey in which men struggle to be the best version of themselves in an existential prison and failed.

Apocalypse Now is an epic war/horror/psychological movie in which a man faces the nature of the human spirit and loses. A walk into the depths of a war-torn country, created by a rich photography, incredible soundtrack, powerful acting and masterful direction to show us how we can become  demons if we blink at the abyss.

PS: The version I watched is the Redux version, which lasts 3 hours and 23 minutes.