PROMETHEUS: Ridley Scott’s Hobbit: There and Forward Again

Prometheus (2012) – Directed by Ridley Scott – Starring Noomi Rapace, Michael Fassbender, Idris Elba, Logan Marshall-Green, Charlize Theron, Guy Pearce, and Patrick Wilson.

If you’re coming to this site for the first time, you need to be made aware of something right now: SPOILERS are coming. Lots and lots of SPOILERS. This isn’t one of those reviews that talks about the film in generic terms, this is a detailed reaction to the movie and I’m not going to limit myself. I’m telling you right up front that SPOILERS are coming, so don’t read on if you don’t want the movie spoiled. Go watch the movie and then come back.

I’m also not here to tell you why you’re wrong for disagreeing with me. I’m here to tell you what I think about movies, nothing more, and I’d love to hear what you think about the film, too. I’m sorely tempted to pull an Avengers and write up reactions to all the principal characters because with this reaction clocking in around 2,400 words, there’s still way more I want to talk about. I simply don’t have the time to do it this time around, but I love that this movie makes me want to write about it.

That’s that. We clear? Right, then, let’s do this.

In case you watched any of the trailers for PROMETHEUS and thought trailers were always an accurate representation of the film it was selling, here’s what PROMETHEUS is not: it’s not ALIEN, it’s not a horror movie, and it’s not a summer blockbuster. It’s really not even a Ridley Scott movie as much as it is a movie about Ridley Scott movies. While Scott is still going strong, at age 74 it’s a safe bet that he’s closer to the end of his career than the beginning, so perhaps it’s not surprising that he’s turned in his most philosophical take on the subjects of life and death.

But since he’s still Ridley Scott, it is equally unsurprising that PROMETHEUS’ answer to these big, important, existentialist questions is that their significance comes from being the fuel that drives humanity on its journey, and not in being answered. PROMETHEUS strikes me as Ridley Scott’s Hobbit, serving as a prequel not just to ALIEN, but to his entire cinematic career. The questions and themes that return again and again in his films are present here, and so PROMETHEUS is contradictory, being both a prequel and a capstone, as if Scott has decided to make a movie in which he attempts to figure out, or coalesce, what he was doing in all of his other movies into this singular film.

And what does he find when he looks back on everything? He finds that it’s much more important to keep pushing forward than to look back, and that questions about where we come from are less important than questions about where we’re going. Life – the actual act of living – is, to Scott, something to be embraced. Questions fuel life, and we are defined not by the destination, not by the answer, but by the journey and the search.

PROMETHEUS is a fantastic movie that does not tell a fantastic story. Ultimately, the most truthful pre-release tease about what PROMETHEUS is came from Scott himself, who said that this film would contain the “strands of ALIEN’s DNA” but explore its own questions, and that’s exactly what it does. That the result is less successful than ALIEN should not come as a huge surprise, since 98% of all movies made don’t measure up to ALIEN. PROMETHEUS fails to live up to ALIEN because the narrative is often clunky and a good many characters are defined more by their appearance than their personalities. I don’t understand why an expedition into deep space would have such a poor screening process that two of its scientists would freak out and bail the second things get weird other than the fact that the story needs to have two scientists freak out and bail the second things gets weird so they can be the first sacrificial lambs to the film’s monsters.

In Dana Stevens’ review of the movie over at Slate, she writes: “Co-scripted by Damon Lindelof of Lost, this film shares that series’ love for nested mythologies and involute philosophical riddles. Prometheus is more interested in piling on big questions than in answering them.” Ms. Stevens is not impressed, lamenting, “Prometheus could have been an elegant, moody sci-fi actioner if only it didn’t strain so hard (especially in the final scenes) for weighty existential meaning. [...] As Prometheus’ characters wrestle with these slippery abstract questions, the concrete and immediate ones raised by the story itself go unanswered. What were the motives of our marble-skinned forebears in creating us, given that they now seem bent on destroying us? And what are David’s motives as he commits acts that seem intended to sabotage the ship’s mission? To judge by a closing teaser that links this movie’s rapidly mutating beasts to the multi-mouthed xenomorphs of Alien, we’ll have to wait until the next installment in the franchise to find out. After all the strenuous philosophizing that came before, the ending’s floppy irresolution feels less like a sophisticated embrace of ambiguity than like a profound cosmic cop-out.”

I’m not picking on Ms. Stevens, nor am I interested in pointing out why she’s wrong, because she’s turned in a well-written review, and other than one instance where she uses the “you” formulation that mistakes her experience for a universal experience, I really only disagree with her conclusions rather than her individual points.

I like PROMETHEUS. I like it quite a bit, though I can certainly understand why people do not like the film. In regards to Ms. Stevens, I simply don’t share her frustrations about the film refusing to answer many of the questions it raises, and I don’t feel like the film is straining for weighty existential meaning at all. The characters in the film struggle with these questions but I don’t think Scott, or the man he chose to re-work the original script he was given, LOST’s Damon Lindelof, struggle with them. I should point out here that I was one of the seeming few who absolutely loved the final episode of LOST, as well, and PROMETHEUS, as Ms. Stevens points out, shares a good deal with LOST’s overall structure of raising questions and building mysteries that it refuses to answer. Like LOST, PROMETHEUS ultimately decides that after building a mystery, resolving the mystery is less important than offering an emotional resolution. If life makes you lemons, Scott and Lindelof are interested in making lemonade, while Stevens is interested in finding out where the lemons came from – neither side is wrong, but I don’t think PROMETHEUS would have been a better film if we did get those answers. Learning why the Engineers did what they did would have provided an interesting answer, but it’s not an answer that defines the film’s characters, and PROMETHEUS is far more interested in examining how the characters react to questions than in answering the actual questions.

I can certainly understand how frustrating this is, and I certainly would not like all stories to be constructed in this manner, but I also have some love for movies that step outside of the box and that refuse to play it straight. And PROMETHEUS does offer answers – it’s just not the answers that its characters forward as being the most important. They’re here to learn about the great mysteries of the universe, but Scott and Lindelof are here to learn about them. And what they find is coded right in plain sight when Janek (Idris Elba) sings a little ditty after getting the invite back to Vickers’ quarters: “If you can’t be … with the one you love … love the one you’re with.”

In other words, embrace the challenges of the moment you’re in. Don’t let your long term desires interfere with the life that’s happening around you.

In 2089, on the Isle of Skye in Scotland, archaeologist Elizabeth Shaw (Noomi Rapace) discovers a star map while on a dig with her partner Charlie Holloway (Logan Marshall-Green). It’s the same star map found across the globe on multiple archaeological finds from civilizations that had no contact with one another. Their find catches the attention of Peter Weyland (Guy Pearce, in some atrociously bag old person make-up), and he funds a trip to the stars so they can find the so-called “Engineers,” whom they hope to find alive.

We’ve got a cast full of people with different goals: Shaw wants to find answers, Holloway wants to find the Engineers alive, Vickers (Charlize Theron) is the corporate agent who lurks in the background, Janek (Idris Elba) is the captain of the ship who is interested in keeping people safe and getting in Vickers’ pants, David (Michael Fassbender), a robot with mysterious, somewhat contradictory actions, and everyone else, who can be grouped under the title of Cannon Fodder.

PROMETHEUS would have benefited a bit from ALIEN’s technique with characterization, where the characters were simply but clearly drawn. Here, characters are a bit more slippery and it’s to the film’s disadvantage. PROMETHEUS is constantly creating doubt as to David and Vickers’ motives, and it throws in odd bumps in the characterization. After getting to LV-223 and discovering a man-made structure which contains dead Engineers and then returning to the ship in a storm, Holloway decides to play the grumpy drunk because the Engineers weren’t alive, and then be a dick to David because …

I dunno. It’s like his manhood is challenged by David’s very existence, so he’s always looking to make little digs at the robot. It’s hardly like David is all that sympathetic, either, because he comes back with one of the oozing metal cylinders and doesn’t tell anyone about it. Then he drugs David’s drink with a bit of the ooze that ends up infecting David, which, in turn, infects/impregnates Shaw after she and David have sex, which leads to Shaw having to enter a surgery tube (I forget the fancy name) where she has to cut out the fast growing alien fetus inside of her.

There’s a question with David about how much of what he’s doing is because he’s a programmed robot and how much is him expanding and potentially jumping his programming. While the crew is in stasis, he’s busy learning about them and simply acquiring knowledge. He likes to play basketball and watch Lawrence of Arabia, and when they reach LV-223, it’s David who has to wake the rest of the crew up.

The biggest narrative failure in PROMETHEUS is that the film doesn’t do a better job setting up David and Shaw as rivals. By combining David, Shaw, Vickers, Janek, and Holloway together in a chaos cloud from which David and Shaw emerge, it muddles the narrative focus. I think the movie would have been better off more clearly making David and Shaw the opposing signposts around which everything revolves, with the other characters filling the grey space between these two black and white positions, because that’s where the movie ultimately ends up, and if you’re going to raise questions that you don’t answer, I think you need to make a point to lock down the emotional conflict, and PROMETHEUS doesn’t do this as strongly as it needs to for me.

Where PROMETHEUS shines is as a spectacle; this is a gorgeously shot movie, whether it’s the ship’s interior or the exterior’s of Earth, space, and LV-223. There’s lots of great little visual touches, with the very-cool red survey “pups” and the blue survey suits working best.

Plus, there’s all the connections to ALIEN, which are not over-sold, but in clear evidence: the Engineer’s space ship, the interior design of Prometheus, the Alien-like creatures, and the H.R. Giger-esque designs that touch nearly everything on LV-223. And in the final scene, the Cthulhu creature shoves its tentacle down the Engineer’s throat and out pops what is clearly the first Alien that we recognize as “our” Alien.

There’s a whole handful of excellent action spectacles, from an Engineer’s initial appearance on Earth to the silica-based storm on LV-223 to the surgery sequence to the Prometheus taking out the Engineers’ ship to the Engineer vs. Cthulu-spawn final battle, but the real signature moment comes when David is on the bridge of the Engineer’s ship and activates the star map. I love scenes like this, where people are walking around inside of massive, 3D maps, and the visual effects team on PROMETHEUS nails it. David figures out that this Engineer ship was headed for Earth when the tragedy happened that cut it short.

What’s that tragedy? The Aliens took them out. Now, these aren’t the Aliens we come to know and love but a prior generation that are clearly modeled on Lovecraft’s Cthulhu more than Giger’s Alien, especially as it grows larger. The role of the Engineers and the Aliens are two of the questions that PROMETHEUS refuses to answer. The film indicates the Engineers did, in fact, build humanity because there’s a DNA match between the two species, and also indicates that the Engineers turned on their creation and were headed to Earth to wipe humanity out. This idea is enforced when the one, last surviving Engineer is awoken and starts killing people. (Which brings up another muddled plot point – Peter Weyland has been kept in deep freeze this while movie and then awoken to go see the Engineers. He’s hoping they grant him immortality, but instead they kill him almost instantly, meaning his whole appearance in space was kind of a pointless dud.) Why did the Engineers create humanity and then want to destroy it? Were the Aliens created by the Engineers to infest the Earth? The film refuses to answer and it doesn’t really bother me all that much because it works as a commentary on faith and how, in the end, whether one chooses to believe in God or disbelieve in God, we’ve yet to get an answer to the question of His existence. What’s important isn’t that we get an answer, but that we keep searching.

I know I’m in the minority on this, but not getting an answer doesn’t really bother me because I’m far more interested in what the characters do with the not knowing than I am bothered with not getting an answer. Both Shaw and David – the woman of religious faith and the atheistic robot – make it out of the film alive and they choose to work together to get off LV-223 and go exploring through space.

The key question that PROMETHEUS poses for itself is David’s, “How far are you willing to go to learn the truth?” All other questions and mysteries are secondary to this concept – what are you willing to do and how far are you willing to go to get the answers you want? Holloway was devastated when he thought there were no Engineers (and thus he dies a physical death that matches his psychological death), but Shaw and David kept pushing forward, and the film ends not with an answer to why the Engineers built humanity or why they then decided to wipe humanity out, but with Shaw and David staying on the hunt.

For me, it’s a powerful resolution, as the true believer and the atheist come together to continue the search for their answers. PROMETHEUS is ultimately about humanity’s never-ending quest for knowledge, and it’s fitting that its two survivors are those who were most interested in acquiring as much knowledge as possible. While it’s a difficult film with a muddled narrative, it’s also an exciting film for me to watch and think about. I can’t wait to see it again.

And therein lies the rub: In Tolkien’s Hobbit, Bilbo’s memoir is entitled There and Back Again, but for Ridley Scott, there is no going back again because a return home signifies an end to the journey, and Scott is too unsettled for tidy endings. The only real finality in his signature films (Alien, Blade Runner, Thelma & Louise, Gladiator) comes through death, and those who make it to the end of Scott’s films are typically unsettled survivors – they may have made it to the credits, but the experience they’ve undergone has altered their worldview in such a way that they cannot mentally go home again even if they can physically go home again.

There and back again? No. There and forward again.

ALIEN: A Survivor, Unclouded by Conscience, Remorse, or Delusions of Morality

Alien (1979) – Directed by Ridley Scott – Starring Sigourney Weaver, Veronica Cartwright, Harry Dean Stanton, John Hurt, Ian Holm, and Yaphet Kotto.

Ridley Scott’s atmospheric masterpiece ALIEN is one of the most influential American films ever made.

For all of Scott’s varies success with films like Blade Runner, Thelma & Louise, and Gladiator, it’s ALIEN that endures most strongly in the work of other film makers. Sci-fi films and slasher films are still aping Scott’s style because it relies on a minimal narrative and a dark atmosphere. That means you can do it on the (relative) cheap.

It’s a well deserved aping, however, because ALIEN is a brilliant movie about a group of working class men and women being terrorized on their ship by an alien menace that they willingly brought aboard and then spend the film trying to eliminate.

Beginning slow and quiet, ALIEN builds as it goes, becoming faster, louder, and more intense with seemingly every new sequence. I think it’s improper to call ALIEN a rollercoaster ride because it’s much less a series of action sequences linked by quieter, character and plot driven sequences than it is a rock rolling downhill, gathering steam as it gathers distance. There are a few instances where we get the action-release-action structure, but like a typical slasher film, once people start getting murdered there’s not much time for quiet reflection.

I see ALIEN as a three act play in which both the alien (designed by the legendary H.R. Giger) and Ripley (Sigourney Weaver) grow in prominence, headed for the inevitable collision of their respective arcs.

In Act I, neither the alien nor Ripley play much of a role. In this first part of the film we see the crew of the Nostromo woken out of their slumber by the ship’s computer. They slowly awaken (and Scott lets his camera linger) and immediately drag themselves to the kitchen for food and smokes. It’s only once they return to duty that they realize they’ve been woken up too early. The Nostromo has intercepted a signal and the crew is required to follow up on it.

The crew is a smart assemblage of quality actors given only a few things to do, and they all do it well. Captain Dallas (Tom Skerritt) is a concerned, thoughtful man who’s willing to give his crew some rope to act on their own but doesn’t shy away from making decisions or verbally smacking them back in line. Parker (Yaphet Kotto) and Brett (Harry Dean Stanton) and the ship’s engineers, constantly complaining about their pay. After they’re reminded that they’ll get paid exactly what their contract says they’ll get paid, Parker throws it back in Dallas’ face when he asks them to do something above and beyond. Kane (John Hurt) is a curious, determined explorer and Lambert (Veronica Cartright) is his antithesis; he wants to keep investigating the distress call and she wants to go back to the ship. Ash (Ian Holm) is the science officer with plenty of secrets, and Ripley is the most well-rounded character, willing to make the tough decision, fight for herself, and still not hiding that she is occasionally scared out of her mind.

We basically learn everything we need to know about them during that eat and smoke table session, which is one of my absolute favorite sci-fi scenes of all time. I don’t love it for its science or even for its particular cleverness. I love it because it comes after a whole set of long, slow, quiet establishing shots that tell us the Nostromo is empty. I love it because it’s so full of life. But mostly I love it because it’s dirty. Blade Runner often gets cited for its dystopian aesthetic, but I prefer the functional, working class future depicted in ALIEN. We don’t see space travel as being glamorous. We don’t see a table full of heroes or moralists or philosophers.

We see working men and women who are paid to do a crummy job at a huge distance from Earth. My dissertation is on 19th century whaling narratives, and the world of the Nostromo resonates in the same way: dirty, dangerous, decidedly unromantic. This is a hard life for hard people.

They’re really not even friends. There’s pairs of friends, of course. Parker and Brett are pals, though it’s more like Brett is the tag-a-long sidekick/Yes Man than an actual pal. There’s a small vibe of a relationship between Dallas and Lambert in the way she pleads with him. But other than that, you get the feeling that these people share the same space but beyond the Nostromo they are not part of each others’ lives.

In order to investigate the intercepted signal, they head to a planet, where they find a massive, abandoned ship. Inside the ship, they find a large dead being sitting in a chair. (And it appears Scott’s upcoming film, Prometheus, will tell a bit of this story of the ship.) The ship’s interior is pure H.R. Giger awesomeness. The settings look both familiar and alien and equally cool and menacing.

Kane finds some big eggs and then a facehugger alien forces itself through Kane’s helmet and attaches itself to his face. They haul him back to the ship where Ripley refuses to let them inside because she’s following quarantine protocol. (Scott doesn’t show any of this rescue and return, negating a potential action sequence which could throw his atmosphere for a loop before it’s even firmly established.) Dallas orders her to let them in, but she refuses. Ash ignores her, however, and lets them in.

Both the alien and Ripley, then, make a show of force that’s ultimately brushed aside by the crew. Kane doesn’t realize the threat the alien poses to his people, while Ash and Kane don’t recognize Ripley’s authority.

This gets us to Act II, when the facehugger pulls off Kane only to have a second alien come bursting out of his chest. It’s still small at this point but obviously it freaks everyone out and they decide to go hunting for it. Both the alien and Ripley begin to take a larger role in the film as they begin to assert the power they do have, and this means it’s time for the killing to start. The crew goes hunting, but it’s Brett and Dallas that end up getting taken out. Lambert wants to cut and run, but Ripley reminds her that the escape shuttle won’t hold four people, so the killing option is still their best bet. Once they take out Ash, and the alien then takes out Lambert and Parker, Ripley is left as the Last Woman Standing.

The most interesting character in this middle portion of the film is Ash, the scientist who has a secret mission to bring the alien back alive. It turns out Ash is a robot whose loyalty lies with the company, not with his fellow crew mates. (The crew has been deemed expendable by the company.) He’s impressed by the resiliency and efficiency of the alien, which horrifies Ripley. Ash describes the alien as “a survivor, unclouded by conscience, remorse, or delusions of morality.” Ash is, of course, also describing himself. As a robot, his actions are simply evidence that he’s fulfilling his programming, meaning he has no conscience, no remorse, no morality. In this sense, he sees the alien as a natural version of himself. For her part, Ripley’s investigation and realization of what Ash is doing, and then her physical confrontation with him firmly asserts her position in the film. It doesn’t even matter that Ripley needs help to defeat Ash because she’s clearly the force that will drive the rest of the film.

Enter Act III, which is the alien vs. Ripley showdown. This is the loudest and most intense act in the film. Ripley decides it’s time to take Lambert’s advice now that only her and the cat are alive, so she starts the self destruct sequence. She tries to stop it when the alien has blocked her path to the shuttle, but she can’t get it stopped so she has to get to the shuttle. When she returns, the alien has left the cat unharmed, allowing Ripley to jump in the shuttle and get the heck out of Dodge. As the shuttle flees, the Nostromo blows up, and then (as you might have guessed) it turns out the alien is inside the shuttle, allowing one final confrontation that Ripley wins by opening the exterior door and letting the alien get sucked into space.

ALIEN doesn’t muck around with too many clever plot twists and narrative turns. Ash being a robot who’s also willing to see the crew killed to get the alien home is it, and they come right on top of each other. Instead, Scott focuses on the dark, moody atmosphere. If you want to note that it’s a male crewman who gets raped and impregnated and the female crewman who ultimately defeats the alien you can do it, and get a lot of mileage out of it, but I am more impressed with having male and female characters who exhibit a wide range of roles and attitudes. These sorts of plots can feel formulaic, but ALIEN never suffers from this because it puts the emphasis on Act I, on the mystery and the tone.

Blade Runner is a more literary film, but I think ALIEN is every bit as brilliant.

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ALIEN / PREDATOR Review Index

ALIEN: A Survivor, Unclouded by Conscience, Remorse, or Delusions of Morality
ALIENS: My Mommy Said There Were No Monsters. No Real Ones. But There Are.
ALIEN 3: A Bunch of Lifers Who Found God at the Ass-End of Space
ALIEN RESURRECTION: Must Be a Chick Thing
ALIEN VS. PREDATOR: I Think This is a Manhood Ritual
ALIEN VS. PREDATOR: REQUIEM: Small Town America Kills Two Franchises at Once

BLADE RUNNER (THE FINAL CUT): Is There Anything Left to Say?

Blade Runner (1982): The Final Cut (2007) – Directed by Ridley Scott – Starring Harrison Ford, Rutger Hauer, Sean Young, Daryl Hannah, William Sanderson, Joanna Cassidy, Edward James Olmos, Brion James, Joe Turkel, and M. Emmet Walsh.

I’d much rather write about a semi-forgotten movie like The Black Hole or a newer, “argument still in process” movie like Sucker Punch than an established classic like BLADE RUNNER, where it feels like everyone has already had the discussion, settled on their opinions, and left to talk about something else.

It’s not that I think I’m changing anyone’s mind with these reviews, but rather that I feel like there’s nothing much left to say about a movie that has been so widely seen and written about that this is just another log on the “BLADE RUNNER is awesome pile.”

BLADE RUNNER is Ridley Scott’s dystopian vision of 2019 Los Angeles. Based on Philip K. Dick’s Do Androids Dream of Electric Sheep?, BLADE RUNNER is a rain-soaked, dark, noir thriller. Rick Deckard (Harrison Ford) is a worn down “Blade Runner,” a special cop who hunts down replicants and “retires” them, which is code for “blasts the sh*t out of them until they die.” Replicants are replicants that look like humans but are banned from use on Earth; they’re manufactured for off-world functions, such as menial labor and sex. If a replicant finds itself on Earth, a Blade Runner is sent after it, and when that happens, we have a movie.

BLADE RUNNER works on every level: story, direction, acting, tone, pace … I could have done without the Vangelis score but it’s not obtrusive. The first half of the film is successful primarily because of the tone and the latter half is successful because of story, as Deckard’s body count rises and his attitude towards replicants shifts.

I don’t like “last job” stories, but BLADE RUNNER succeeds in telling a last job story because Deckard has already checked out of this life, and when he’s then pulled back in by his boss (M. Emmet Walsh) his reluctance is reinforced by his experience with the replicants. This isn’t just one of those “I want to quit” stories but rather, “I need to quit,” and that need is soaked onto Ford’s face in every scene of the film. (And, let’s be honest, the dour Deckard seems much more like the Harrison Ford we see in interviews than Han or Indy ever did; Ford was born to play this part.) When he falls for Rachael (Sean Young), it’s not so much that his love for her changes him as much as his desire for her reveals his already changing attitude. While Deckard goes out and does his job, killing the escaped replicant Zhora (Joanna Cassidy), and then being saved by Rachael from being killed by Leon (Brion James), he’s already fallen for Rachael. His bedding of Rachael comes off as less about Deckard wanting Rachael as it does Deckard struggling with his attitude towards replicants.

Ridley Scott has deftly taken the detective noir and transposed it onto a sci-fi story. BLADE RUNNER uses the noir for its structure, and the sci-fi for its philosophy, with the two genres colliding in the impressive visual look. Deckard is very much the beaten down cop/private eye who lives alone, drinks too much, and falls for the wrong woman. He’s the only guy who can do this job and he does it without joy, any desire he once had to retire replicants long gone. It’s only natural he falls for Rachael, the most advanced replicant he’s met, after it takes him nearly three times as many questions to out her as a replicant using the Voight-Kampff Test as it does a normal replicant.

The big question with Deckard, of course, is whether he’s a replicant or not. According to the Never Wrong, Ford wanted Deckard to be human while Scott wanted Deckard to be a replicant. I think the film is ambiguous to support either position, which means it’s really ambiguous enough to not support either position. Personally, I think the story, as presented in the Final Cut, actually supports the human position better; the key to Deckard being a replicant centers on the unicorn dream sequence, which is then reinforced by Gaff (Edward James Olmos) leaving a unicorn origami figure near his door at the end of the film when Deckard and Rachael take off together. On the other side, however, that’s not exactly rock solid evidence. We also have Deckard’s eyes – throughout the film, replicant’s eyes are shown to “glow” as a result of the way light reflects off of them. This never happens with Deckard.

I think the film wants to leave it ambiguous; certainly if Scott really wanted to enforce Deckard-as-replicant, he could have made it more clear, but he doesn’t. The ambiguity angle works with how the film ends, as the final confrontation between Roy (Rutger Hauer) and Deckard shows both the physical brutality the replicants are capable of, as well as their humanity, as he spends a good amount of time beating the crap out of Deckard and then saves the cop from falling to his death in order for Deckard to watch Roy’s four-year lifespan come to its programmed ending.

From a viewer’s standpoint, I think Human Deckard works better for how this story is constructed than Replicant Deckard. If Deckard is human, then his relationship with Rachael signifies hope that humanity will eventually come to see their creations as more than simple slaves. If Deckard is a replicant then his falling for Rachael symbolizes his own awakening as a machine realizing it’s a machine, and that’s not nearly as strong an ending because we’ve already seen a whole movie full of machines that realize they’re machines. I think if you want Deckard to be a replicant then it needs to be revealed and dealt with in the film itself, and not left to the imagination.

One of the joys in watching BLADE RUNNER is how great the individual performances are beyond Ford’s rock solid center. Rutger Hauer is phenomenal as Roy Batty, calculating and cold one moment, emotional and hot the next. Sean Young reminds you she can do more than act crazy in real life. Brion James and M. Emmet Walsh are their usual dependable selves, and Daryl Hannah is alluring in her cat-like seduction and manipulation of William Sanderson, one of my personal favorite actors.

BLADE RUNNER’s place as a cinematic classic is well-earned. Personally, I don’t think it’s as good as Ridley Scott’s Alien, but it is a damn fine movie in its own right.