Dreams of Unicorns

Yesterday, I saw Bladerunner for the first time. Yes, despite my interest in the genre, I'd never seen the movie before, and I quickly realized that I'd had some skewed ideas about the movie's subject. Before seeing it, I'd vaguely thought that the Deckard character was a fugitive ... and no, not just because he was being played by Harrison Ford.

The world in the movie really shines, or maybe "shines" is a bad word, given its character: dark, decaying, and jackdaw assembled from the remnants of humanity. The ambivalence under the storyline - do replicants have humanity? What are they rights? - are blurred and left quiet, to good effect. These individuals have killed twenty-three people and even if you believe they are fully human, yeah, they likely deserve to be shot on sight, and yet you come to feel for them.

Rutger Hauer is fantastic. The man is a hell of an actor. Why he seems to have done this movie and then Ladyhawke and dropped into mediocre-to-bad movie obscurity passes my understanding. Harrison Ford is average(sorry!), and both Sean Young (Rachael) and Daryl Hannah (Pris) are mesmerizing in completely different ways. Then again, Ford is our point of view character, and the eyes we look through need to be fairly normal ... so the rest of the world can be as strange as it needs to be.