The Green Hornet is one of those movies
in which the villain shoots his right-hand man for no good reason, only to have
his second-tier henchmen drag the body away and charge into battle.
You've got to wonder how that works. I mean, let's say you're a henchman.
You're talking to your headhunter and weighing competing offers from Hank Scorpio and the villain from
this movie. Scorpio offers a free dental plan and contributes to your 401(k).
This guy offers you a speedy climb up the ladder, followed by a quick and
violent death if you happen to catch him on a bad day. I don't know about
you, but I'm going with Scorpio.
The
worst thing about this villain is that we've seen so many like him. Yes, The Green Hornet is an action-comedy, so he's made silly
(and Christoph Waltz sells the material), but he's just lazily written, as are
the other villains, the heroes, and even Edward James Olmos as Gravitas Guy.
In fact, the whole thing feels lazy and shambling, including the car
chases and the ‘splosions. I did enjoy how The Green Hornet paints its star as an unrelenting doofus
and his sidekick, Kato, as the bright and competent one, but even that joke got
boring after the first fifteen iterations.
Now, Blade Runner, on the other hand: there's a movie. A
sci-fi noir, it offers an intriguing vision of the future, tackles big
questions, and creates sufficient ambiguity for thirty years' worth of
conversations.
Blade Runner takes place in Los
Angeles, 2019 (!). It's January or February because it's raining, it gets
dark early, and its characters can get away with wearing trench coats when they
want to look cool. In this future, short-lived artificial humans known as
"replicants" serve as slave labor in the offworld colonies.
Sometimes, they escape and make their way back to Earth. Harrison
Ford plays Rick Deckard, the titular Blade Runner. His job is to hunt
down runaway replicants and kill them. Roy Batty (Rutger Hauer) is a
replicant, but he's stronger, faster, smarter than most. He's angry
because he feels that he was created only to suffer and die. He wants to
face his Creator. He wants to beg for more years. He wants to know
why he was made. He wants to lash
out.
Even
with the unavoidable anachronisms of an older science-fiction property, Blade Runner's world looks and feels
futuristic enough to entice the imagination. There might be slavery on
the offworld colonies, but at least there are offworld
colonies. The clothes look different from contemporary fashion, yet they
still look like clothes actual people might wear. Best of all (and like
Scott's classic Alien), we can
imagine actually living in this world. We can imagine what it smells
like, sounds like. Yes, Blade
Runner has
flying cars. But they make sense, and they belong. [Note: here's a neat
little appreciation for Blade Runner's
F/X work from Popular Mechanics.]
The
best science fiction, of course, is philosophy or social criticism made up to
look like a genre tale. Blade
Runner is more the former, and how. It's an existential shout at
God, asking, "Why am I here? Why is life so short? Why do we
suffer?" It mourns the idea of death. Read Roy Batty's dying
words: "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." Who hasn't despaired in the face of the transience of beauty,
of the fleeting nature of joy? 'Of course there's an afterlife,' we tell
ourselves. 'Otherwise, all of this would go to waste.' But if there
isn't, oh, oh.
Of
course, I'm a guy who welcomes seeing a film as an invitation to explore 2500
years of Western philosophical tradition; but I get that I'm in the minority. Blade Runner also offers something
for people who just like a good mystery. First, there's the mystery that
drives the plot as we're actually sitting in the chair: who are the replicants,
where are they, and what do they want? For coffee afterward, the film
leaves open the question of Deckard's identity. He might be a
replicant. His memories, his history might be implanted. This
ambiguity is baked into the film: Ford says he thought Deckard was human, while
director Ridley Scott thought otherwise. On a related note, what does the
Edward James Olmos character know, what does he think about it, and what will
he do? This is chewy, fun stuff: the kind of material that's fuelled many
a late-night bull session over the years.
To
sum up, Blade
Runner is
a classic, a masterpiece. Even if Ridley Scott hadn't made Alien or Thelma
and Louise or Black
Hawk Down, we'd know his name for this film alone. Even if
you've seen it, even if you love it, it'll be worth your time to see it again.
