Film Friday: Total Recall (2012)

Sometimes, I don’t even know where to begin when talking about a film. Colin Farrell’s Total Recall is one of those films. Should I tell you about the pointless and nonsensical plot? How about the fact this is just a long chase scene? The bad science? The bad acting? Ug. This film sucks.

Total Recall is ostensibly a remake of Arnold Schwarzenegger’s 1990 Total Recall, but it really isn’t. In essence, they took the key moments from Arnold’s film, stole images liberally from Minority Report, I Robot and Phantom Menace, and then mixed them with a generic chase film about a nondescript right-wing government wanting to kill immigrants for no apparent reason. The result is painful to watch. Arg.

The story involves Douglas Quaid (Colin Farrell), a worker in a dead-end factory job making police robots. Each morning he travels from “the Colony” (Australia) to “the United Federation of Britain” which are the only places on the planet that somehow survived a chemical war. To commute back and forth, Farrell takes a gravity elevator which moves between the two countries.

Bored with his job, Quaid goes to an Oriental Masseuse Chinese Restaurant Rekall, a place-thingy where they implant memories into your head, unless you lie or ask for memories that are like your real life memories because then somethingsomething. As Quaid gets his new memories, a SWAT team bursts into the place and kills everyone but him. Quaid goes all super-spy and kills them and then races home to his wife (Kate Beckinsale), who tries to kill him. It turns out that she’s a spy who was assigned to watch him, but apparently doesn’t know who he really is... for no apparent reason. Who is he really? Why, he’s a terrorist or double agent named Carl Hauser, who may know a kill code for all the police robots. And why is he living as a factory worker with no memory of who he really is? Who knows, who cares?

Anyways, no sooner does Kate try to kill him than Jessica Biel shows up and the chase scene commences. About an hour later, we are told that Quaid led the bad guy, Cohaagen, the Chancellor of Britain, right to the rebels... all five of them. Now that he’s caught the rebels, Cohaagen can finally send an army of killer robots to the Colony to kill everyone... so he does, but Quaid stops him. At that point, the first thing you actually care about in this film happens: the credits start rolling and you can leave.

When Arnold Schwarzenegger did Total Recall in 1990, I found myself quite impressed. Not only was Total Recall a competent action film, but it was also an excellent science fiction film which left you with lots of things to think about. What is memory? And how can you tell hallucination from reality? What would colonizing Mars really be like? Will we find massive machines left by ancient civilizations?

These were all fun questions that you could debate for hours or even days after you left the theater. And debate you did: did you notice that the false memories the Recall guy discusses match what happens in the film exactly? Don’t you remember the Recall guy saying, “Blue sky on Mars? That’s original.” But wait! Why would that guy sweat if it was all a dream? Or was that just Arnold’s mind trying to preserve the illusion? And if they could put him into Arnold’s dream, couldn’t they do something else that Arnold would know for sure is not real? Or would Arnold just assume that anything they do was a trick?

Good times.

None of that is true with this film. This film posits no questions... except “why did they make this?” It leaves nothing to the imagination. Quaid IS a rebel spy. Biel IS his girlfriend and he’s been seeing her in his dreams before he even goes to Rekall. There is zero sense that Rekall put these thoughts into his brain. In fact, when the film has Quaid look at a Rekall sign at the end of the film, it just serves to remind you that they really mishandled the whole idea of confusing reality with fantasy.

But even that could be forgiven if this was a decent film, only, it’s not. This film is one long pointless chase scene that makes little sense and to which there is no sense of a solution except “wait for the chase to end and then the cliché ending to sort everything out.” Indeed, at no point do you feel like anything is happening in this film except time passing as you wait for the ending. Moreover, little about the film makes sense. If the bad guy really wants to invade the Colony, there’s no reason he couldn’t do it with or without first stopping the resistance, so the plot is a pretext. There is no point in making Quaid hide as a factory worker with no knowledge of what he really is either, nor is there any reason Beckinsale wouldn’t know who he really was.

Even worse, to pass the time, this film is jammed with all kinds of political stupidity. Obama’s face on their currency? Give me a break. That’s not even clever if we’re talking about the future USA, and we’re not – this is a future Britain. I wonder if Putin is on their coins or Bobo the Clown. How about the idea that Britain wants to kill their workforce for no apparent reason? Talk about stupid. That only makes sense in the paranoid delusions of leftists.

In any event, this film raises a couple issues that merit mentioning. First, this film continues to make me wonder about Colin Farrell. Farrell showed such promise early in his career that it seemed he would soon be considered one of the best actors of this generation. But after films like this and the remake of Fright Night, the bloom is off the Farrell rose. He’s fast becoming a harbinger of failure.

Secondly, this film shows exactly what’s wrong with modern Hollywood. This film stole the key moments from the 1990 version of Total Recall, which should have been enough to give the film at least some of the same appeal as the original. But they mishandled those by turning them into nothing more than speed bumps in the chase scene... moments that appear, resolve, don’t affect the plot, and then are forgotten as the film races on to the next videogame level. I lay the blame for this firmly on studios who are so out of touch with the public that they don’t realize that in a film about the reliability of memory and the blurring of reality with fantasy, audiences expect the story to have something to say about those things rather than just watching our hero run around blowing up police robots and Froggering his way across an unrealistic elevator system... the Big Shiny. Sadly, this is how studios think now and the result is a film that has better effects, better actors, better sets, a bigger budget, and the benefits of hindsight, but can’t hold an LED candle to the original.

Finally, I need to point out that, once again, we are dealing with a film adaptation of a novel by Philip K. Dick. And once again, we are looking at a film that underwhelms. It continues to surprise me how hard it is to put Dick’s ideas on the big screen in an interesting and watchable way. Fascinating.

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Film Friday: The Adjustment Bureau (2011)

I see where The Adjustment Bureau looked like a brilliant concept. Random chance brings a man and woman together. They fall in love. But God’s plan for the world requires they be apart. Angels separate them, but the man fights against God’s plan to be with his true love. That’s an incredible amount of fascinating conflict. Sadly, Bureau mishandles every aspect of this and muddles all the conflict, which makes it feel as tired and indifferent as the last few weeks of a canceled television show.

** spoiler alert -- I will talk about the ending **

The Plot

Matt Damon is the idealized liberal politician destined to become President. Damon meets a woman (Emily Blunt) and falls in love. Damon is kidnapped by men who turn out to be angels, and told he cannot be with the woman because it violates “the Chairman’s” plan (i.e. God). If he tries to be with her, they will blank his personality and leave him insane. Damon still tries to find her because he’s fallen in true love. He finds her. Now the angels warn Damon he will ruin her life and his if he doesn’t leave her. He does, but then goes back to her. Surprise! They chase him. He tries to see God to get God’s plan changed. True love conquers all.

Where It All Went Wrong

Based on a Philip K. Dick story, Bureau is one of those films that feels wrong when you watch it because you have a hard time caring about the things they tell you to care about, the mystery doesn’t seem mysterious, and it all feels pointless. Here’s why. Films are about conflict, and conflict requires interesting stakes. If there’s nothing worth gaining or losing, then the conflicts won’t interest the audience and the story will be hard to care about. Bureau is packed with conflict, but it keeps undercutting every single stake it tries to establish.

For example, there are problems at the outset with the believability of the characters. Damon is running for Senate and dreams of becoming president. This desire to be president is a vital point to the story, as you’ll see in a moment. But Damon’s character seems indifferent to the prospect. In fact, the only reason we know he wants to be President is because other characters tell us this is what Damon wants. This is bad writing and it happens throughout the film -- we are constantly told things are true even though there’s no evidence to support them.

The love story suffers similarly. Instead of finding some way to show us how much Damon and this woman love each other, we get only good- natured, self-depreciating ribbing along with a couple kisses. To convince us this is love and not just acquaintanceship, the writer has the other characters tell us repeatedly that these two are in love. In fact, they don’t just tell us they are in love, they tell us they are in God’s plan-shattering destiny LOVE. Yet, there isn’t the slightest hint of this from Damon or the woman. This is mainly the fault of really poor writing, but Damon plays a role in this failure too. Matt Damon has become a nasty man, and I don’t just mean politically. The likable Matt Damon of Good Will Hunting and Ocean’s 11 has been replaced by the brooding Jason Bourne, and Damon seems angry throughout this film.

Even beyond the love story, Damon’s character is hard to believe. He’s presented as the ideal (liberal) politician -- a young good looking environmentalist outsider who isn’t like other politicians. . . he’s “authentic!” And what proves he’s authentic is a concession speech he gives where he exposes the sordid underbelly of candidate packaging. But here’s the problem. This speech is pedantic and pointless. We’re supposed to believe he’s exposing some big secret which makes the world fall in love with his authenticity, but all he’s really doing is confessing that he paid a consultant to pick his tie and scuff his shoes. There’s no substance in the speech which would make the public love him. So how do we know the public loves him? Because every character tells us so -- the writer even obnoxiously has random characters call out Damon’s name as he walks around town and tell him they voted for him and they love him.

As an aside, Damon is clearly a white version of Barack Obama and the script is laced with Obamaism, like when one of the angels says he doesn’t know God’s plan because “that’s above my pay grade.”

But all of that is just the beginning of the problem. The film really falls apart when it gets to the stakes. The angels tell Damon that if he doesn’t abandon the woman, then his dream of becoming president will be destroyed. Those are the stakes: true love versus fulfilling his dream. But these are problematic stakes, because wanting to be president isn’t a dream people consider realistic. And there’s no reason to think he needs to be president to cause something good or stop something bad. Nor will he end up homeless eating garbage if he fails, he’ll still be rich and famous. That’s not really a horrible loss, so it’s hard to get worked up over this. Also as mentioned above, he certainly doesn’t seem to care about this personally.

And it gets worse. As the story unfolds, the angels tell us the reason he wants to be president is the plan calls for it, hence the angels put the desire to be president into his head. But this kills the stakes. Now Damon is being asked to give up true love or he won’t be able to fulfill a dream that was never his. See the problem?

It gets worse yet. For one thing, a little earlier in the film, when they established what the angels can and cannot do, we were told the angels can’t change your desires. Suddenly, we have a story-rules breakdown. Also, this undercuts his greatness as a politician because the angels tell us this desire derives from a desperate need to be loved by crowds. In other words, he doesn’t want to be president because he’s a principled person with good ideas, he wants to be president because he craves the public’s love.

Further, Damon is looking to give up “his” dream because he has fallen in true love with this woman, right? That’s what we’re told. And it is God’s will that they never hook up. Thus, this film is about Damon’s free will challenging the God-created fate which the angels are trying to impose -- indeed, this free will v. fate point is made repeatedly throughout the film. Only, it turns out that God had a plan before the current plan and in that Plan A, Damon and the woman were to fall deeply in love. And the reason the angels are having a problem keeping them apart is that remnants of the original Plan A are still out there interfering with the new Plan B.

Now think about this.

● This means Damon isn’t acting according to free will. He is instead a victim of two contradictory versions of fate colliding. Ergo, the entire free will v. destiny conflict is phony and we no longer have any reason to care how it resolves.

● This means the whole “greatest love ever” bit is phony as well. They haven’t fallen in love against the very will of God, they fell in love because God told them to under Plan A and screwed up his math on his new Plan B. Their love is not real, it is forced upon them. Thus, it’s really not worthy of being a stake and this undercuts the entire love story.

● The whole movie is premised on the idea that God can’t change his plan. This is why the angels are so desperate to force Damon to surrender his (non-existent) free will. But now we’re told God changed his plan already once for Damon. In fact, we’re told of two other instances where God changed his plan. Further, there’s a whole division of angels who swoop in to erase people’s personalities when they don’t do as they’re told, and thereby completely re-write the plan again. In effect, we’re told Damon is going against an unchangeable plan, yet that plan gets changed all the time.

● In the end, Damon tries to get God to change his plan. To do this, Damon goes through a door by turning the doorknob left instead of right, something he’s been told never to do because “that’s only for angels.” He does it anyway, “risking everything” and thereby proving his love is so powerful that God sees it as worthy of changing the unchangeable plan. But he’s not really risking anything because the angels are chasing him to blank him out. Thus, he either does this or he dies. That’s not “risking everything.”

This is why this film fails. It promises some interesting ideas but has no clue how to handle them as it keeps undercutting everything it does, from the conflicts it establishes to the reasons we’re supposed to believe the characters. And despite the cool philosophical implications of this film, the writer basically just wrote a chase-movie. Not only are ideas like omniscience, omnipotence, faith, and even the mercy of God ignored, but the writer chickens out on his subversive idea of man v. God by making the angels fools who can’t stop Damon, by refusing to call God “God” and instead calling him “the Chairman,” and by studiously avoiding all of the philosophical and theological questions. “The Chairman” could just as easily have been some alien or a government conspiracy and little would have needed to change in this film.

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Film Friday: Screamers (1995)

I like Screamers. It’s a decent science fiction film about machines turning on man. The story is unique and inspired and the plot handles the story well. There really isn’t anything about this film I would change. Yet, I can’t call it a great film. In fact, if I were to rate it, I’d give it a solid B. I find that fascinating.

** spoiler alert**

Based on Philip K. Dick's short story “Second Variety,” Screamers involves a group of soldiers stuck in a genocidal war on a formerly rich mining colony. The year is 2078. A dispute over the profits from mining a rare mineral on Sirius 6B has caused Earth to split into two warring economic groups: the Alliance and the New Economic Block. War begins on Sirius. But the Alliance is outnumbered, so they invent a new weapon: the mobile autonomous sword (a screamer). These are power-saw- like robots that travel beneath the ground and kill anything living -- Alliance soldiers are protected by wrist bands which mask their heartbeats. The war devastated the planet and few soldiers remain on either side.

As the story opens, a N.E.B. soldier is killed outside the Alliance bunker. He’s carrying a proposal directed to Alliance commander Joe Hendricksson (Peter Weller) to negotiate a peace treaty. The mineral has been discovered on another planet and, thus, their war has become irrelevant. So Weller and a newly-arrived soldier (Private Jefferson) set out to negotiate with the N.E.B. commander, Marshall Richard Cooper. Only, they don’t find Cooper. When they get to the Alliance bunker, they find only three survivors. It turns out the screamers have been busy evolving and now there are several varieties. . . and some of them look human.

Here’s what fascinates me. I typically judge the quality of a film by asking how I would improve the film. The less I would do differently, the better the film. On the surface, Screamers is a film with little to change. The actors are good, the sets and effects are good, the plot works well and moves quickly. The characters are interesting and the twists are solid and unexpected. So I should rate this film very highly. But I can’t.

At first, this had me wondering if my test doesn’t really work. Could it be that some stories simply have a ceiling of how good they can be no matter how much you tinker with them? I’ve always worked on the assumption that you can take any story and keep adjusting it until you reach a point that it becomes a great story. But maybe that’s not true? Maybe a story like Screamers simply can’t ever become more than an average story no matter what you do differently or what you add to it?

What about another director? Could Steven Spielberg make this a better film? Based on his adventures in the world of Dick with Minority Report, I doubt it. Minority Report left me deeply underwhelmed. Christopher Nolan handled complex questions of who you can trust well in Inception and Memento, but I also doubt he could help Screamers. And the reason I doubt Nolan can help is because I know what’s wrong with Screamers and it’s the same thing that’s wrong with Inception and with Minority Report: they lack humanity.

The film we should be looking at is Blade Runner. What makes Blade Runner so special isn’t the film noir feel brought to science fiction or even the new take on dystopia, it’s the humanity of Blade Runner. Blade Runner hooks us by asking us to find out what lays behind Harrison Ford’s tough guy veneer, to find out how Rachel deals with discovering she’s not human, and to learn what causes Roy’s epiphany at the end of the film. Blade Runner asks us what makes us human and then lets us peer deeply into the souls of three people to find out.

This is where Screamers and Minority Report went wrong. Minority Report is a shallow Tom Cruise film at heart. Despite the attempt to cram Spielberg-style emotional ploys into the film, there is no moment where we can really look into Tom’s soul. Watch the film a thousand times and you still won’t know anything more about him than you did staring at the poster before the movie began. But go back and watch Roy’s split-second change of heart or the shock on Rachel’s face as Ford lays bare the lie of her childhood or the anguish in Ford as he realizes he’s been taking genuine lives, and you’ll peer right into their souls.

Screamers fails this test. I like Peter Weller and his character. Jefferson is a fun guy to watch. The N.E.B.s are interesting too. Becker is a twisted psycho on the edge and Ross is a man whose nerves are so shot he’s visibly falling apart. But there isn’t a single moment in this film where you ever look into their souls or where you are shown the difference between a human and a machine pretending to be human.

To fix Screamers, it must be refocused on what makes Hendricksson human in the first place. Don’t just give us two minutes of dialog telling us about some old girlfriend or telling us what he drinks or what kind of music he likes. Show us what makes him tick. Show us how he resolved some emotional struggle so we understand him. Show us he has a soul, so we can peer into it at the key moment of crisis.

In fact, I am thinking this may be the key to all science fiction. Too often science fiction feels flat. And when I think of the films that did work, I realize that what worked was not the plot, it was the moments the characters became real. It was watching Sean Connery admit on a racquetball court that he needed to prove his own worth to himself in Outland. It was the brief moments mentioned above in Blade Runner. It was learning who Jim Kirk really was week after week in Star Trek and seeing each week’s main character deal with their own humanity in very inhuman circumstances on The Twilight Zone. It was watching the crew come together after bickering and picking on each other in Alien or the moments of bravery rather than bravado in Aliens. It was the flirting moments in Empire Strikes Back. Etc. These are the moments we remember.

So the lesson here is if you want to write enduring, quality science fiction, don’t write a story about a thing or place or event, write a story about people who happen to encounter a thing or place or endure an event.

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Film Friday: Minority Report (2002)

I want to like Minority Report, but I can't. It’s based on a Philip K. Dick short story, and I usually enjoy movies based on his stories (see, e.g. Blade Runner and Imposter), plus it’s got a strong cast, excellent pacing, an interesting plot and some deep themes. But there’s just something wrong with the film and Spielberg knows it.

** heavy spoiler alert**

The Plot

Directed by Steven Spielberg, Minority Report is the story of John Anderton (Tom Cruise), a Washington, D.C. police officer who works in the world’s first “PreCrime” division. PreCrime is a new concept whereby a group of “pre-cogs” (psychics) predict murders in advance. Anderton’s division is charged with arresting the murderers before they can act. But things go horribly wrong for Anderton when the pre-cogs announce that he will murder someone he doesn't even know. Soon he is chased by a Justice Department overseer (Colin Farrell) and discovers he was framed by his boss (Max von Sydow).

On the surface, Minority Report sounds like a smart film. It purports to deal with issues of free will versus destiny and it raises interesting questions about when a crime becomes a crime. Unfortunately, Minority Report is not a smart film and it fudges all of its themes. I think Spielberg knows this too, because he tries to distract the audience at key moments.

Free Will v. Destiny

Minority Report pounds away on the issue of free will versus destiny. Indeed, this is mentioned in almost every scene. Normally, this would be fertile ground for interesting science fiction storytelling, but something feels wrong with this theme throughout the film. And that something is that Spielberg uses an unworkable concept of destiny and then tries to cover up his failure rather than fix the problem.

For the film’s setup to work, the audience must believe the pre-cogs are infallible because we need to believe they can predict people’s destinies. If we don’t buy that premise, then there is no destiny to challenge Anderton’s free will. Thus, this idea is reinforced to us by almost every character throughout the film repeatedly telling us that the pre-cogs are never wrong. Even when we are finally told they can be wrong, we’re still told they are never wrong. . . they just sometimes “disagree” (hence, one gives a “minority report”).

But this is a false premise. For one thing, it's just never believable that there is any real destiny here. It is easy to believe in destiny when it’s something beyond your control, e.g. you will meet an old friend. But it’s impossible to believe in destiny if destiny requires a conscious act, e.g. murder. Think about it. If the cops show up at your door and tell you that you’re destined to murder your wife, does anyone really think you would feel compelled to go through with it? Indeed, the very concept of PreCrime wipes out the destiny element because they are stopping the murders. Hence, there is no destiny here, there is only a possible future which can be changed -- not to mention the pre-cogs apparently can disagree about the future. Therefore, the idea that Anderton is fighting destiny seems rather fraudulent from the beginning.

Moreover, the only reason Anderton appears to have a destiny is because every character repeatedly tell us that Anderton’s destiny is inescapable and because Spielberg manipulates the plot to cause it. Indeed, what Anderton does makes no sense. He should go to his boss and tell him, “this is a mistake. I’m not killing anyone and I’m going to go sit quietly in a cell until this prediction expires.” Instead, he foolishly decides to track down the guy he is supposed to kill. . . because that will somehow clear things up? Of course, Spielberg tries to make this seem plausible by having the other cops chase him. But it's hard to image a law that could convict him if he simply sat down and never killed anyone.

These problems undercut the very theme upon which Spielberg bases the whole film. He pounds away relentlessly at the idea that Anderton is struggling against destiny, but there is no destiny, there is only pretend destiny created by Spielberg’s manipulation and the constant barraged of characters telling us there is a destiny. What Spielberg should have done instead is drop the destiny farce and explore the theme of how many innocent people we are prepared to lock away to prevent all murders. That is the obvious theme within his setup. But Spielberg dodges that one, probably because it’s a difficult question of morality.

How Can A Possible Future Be A Crime?

The second problem stems from the believability of the whole concept as a law enforcement tool. If the police knew you would kill your wife at some particular hour, do you really think society would lock you up as a murderer? It’s not likely. Arresting someone for something they haven’t done yet flies in the face of two thousand years of Western jurisprudence and runs counter to human nature. More likely, the role of the PreCrime division would be to stop you and maybe send you for a mental health hearing. Interestingly, Spielberg tries to hide this issue by making sure that each killer we see is caught just as they are about to strike so the audience never gets a chance to ask if this is how the system would really work.

What’s more, it seems inconceivable that our legal system would trust the pre-cogs. For one thing, the minority reports all but disqualify the pre-cogs as legitimate predictors of fact as compared to possibility. But even beyond that, I still can’t conceive of a method for testing their accuracy that would stand up to court scrutiny? Did they sit around for decades predicting every murder while the government compared their predictions to trial results? It just seems implausible that courts would send people away based on the visions of three druggies lying in a fish tank. Also, consider both von Sydow’s death and the death of Anderton’s “victim.” Both are clearly suicides with Anderton never pulling the trigger in either instance. Yet, Anderton is identified as the killer? Can’t the pre-cogs distinguish between murder and suicide or self-defense? How many rape victims and shopkeepers were arrested for murder? And why would anyone trust a system that can’t separate these important details?

Spielberg sees these problems as well. Thus, he gives us Colin Farrell, who plays some sort of Justice Department overseer or auditor. His role is to assure the audience the government, i.e. the Justice Department, watches this program carefully and finds it legitimate. He also plays the skeptic who is quickly won over, which is a gimmick to alleviate the audience’s doubts.

The Plot Holes

The plot really is nonsense. First, it falls into the standard “boss did it” cliché, which we discussed the other day. Secondly, I can’t for the life of me figure out why Anderton’s boss (von Sydow) decided to set Anderton up? Sure, he mouths something about protecting the program from Anderton discovering that he killed someone in the past to protect the program, but Anderton only found that out after von Sydow set him up. So the only reason I can see for von Sydow setting Anderton up is to cause the plot.

Further, the explanation of how von Sydow did the original murder makes no sense. We’re told he got away with it because the cops would have ignored his attempt as it would have appeared to be an echo of the prior murder attempt. But wasn’t there a ball (“report”) with his name on it? Didn’t that make anyone suspicious that this was more than just an echo?

There’s a huge problem with von Sydow killing Colin Farrell too. Spielberg through von Sydow tells us that von Sydow can get away with the killing because Anderton stole the head pre-cog and, thus, the cops have no idea a murder is being committed. But how is von Sydow going to explain the body in his office? How can he hope to blame Anderton for this? Has the future somehow lost the ability to run ballistics tests and gun powder residue tests? Only D.C. is on the pre-cog program, surely the FBI can figure this one out.

There are other problems too. For example, von Sydow wants to roll out the PreCrime concept nationally, but how can he do that when they only have three pre-cogs and only one of them is actually gifted enough to make the whole program work? Why are all the killers in the cryoprison Caucasians? Even more interestingly, this is supposed to be Washington, D.C., what happened to all the blacks? And why does D.C. look like some sort of Blade-Runner version of Hong Kong?

Conclusion

As I said above, I want to like this film. I like the actors and I generally enjoy films made from Philip Dick’s work. The plot sounds like it should be interesting and the themes should be deep and give you something to think about. But the film simply doesn’t work. Spielberg is talented enough to hide his mistakes and keep the viewer from seeing them right away, but they gnaw at you. And the film completely breaks down when you think about it. That’s why I can’t like this film: Spielberg fudged the whole thing. . . and he knows it.

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Film Friday: Blade Runner (1982)

Ridley Scott’s Blade Runner is brilliant. This is filmmaking at its best because it takes science fiction and stretches it to its fullest potential, both in terms of storytelling and as an intellectual experience. It’s also noteworthy for being massively culturally relevant because it redefined “dystopia” for a new generation, and in so doing, it signaled the end of the counter-culture’s influence in science fiction.

** spoiler alert **

Loosely based on “Do Androids Dream of Electric Sheep?” by Philip K. Dick, Blade Runner is the story of Richard Deckard (Harrison Ford), a police specialist who hunts down and "retires" escaped androids, known as Replicants. Deckard is pursuing four Replicants, led by Roy Batty (Rutger Hauer), who illegally returned to Earth to find their maker, who they believe can extend their lifespans, which are artificially limited to four years. Despite the seeming simplicity of this summary, Blade Runner is a highly complex and innovative film. Indeed, it singlehandedly redefined the confines of science fiction as well as our view of dystopia.

Dystopia Lost, Dystopia Changed

Prior to Blade Runner, dystopian films invariably involved societies that appeared perfect on the surface, but were soulless underneath. From Logan’s Run to Rollerball to Fahrenheit 451, these societies appeared health, happy and peaceful, but something was always missing, some element of humanity was stripped away. This concept fit perfectly with the clash between the counter-culture and the conformity society created after World War II. But Blade Runner changed that.

The dystopian world of Blade Runner is dark, dirty and full of the twisted dregs of humanity. This is a world that destroyed itself, not with a bang but with neglect, where those who could escape to a better life moved to the off-world colonies, leaving humanity's flotsam to fester in the collapsing, polluted world left behind. Moreover, this dystopia came about because society fell apart, not because society was too tightly controlled, as was the case in prior dystopian films. Thus, whereas the pre-Blade Runner view of dystopia was the counter-culture’s view of the worst aspects of conformist society run amok, the dystopia in Blade Runner was society’s view of the worst elements of the counter-culture run amok. And with rare exceptions, this has become the view of dystopia which dominates films today. Blade Runner marks this serious shift in societal attitudes.

Where No Science Fiction Has Gone Before

Blade Runner also singlehandedly expanded the bounds of science fiction. How? By realizing that science fiction need not follow the trappings and conventions of science fiction, and by realizing that any story can be interpreted as science fiction. Indeed, nowhere in Blade Runner will you find spaceships or laser-gun fights or aliens and strange planets. Even the very dialog of Blade Runner is unlike anything that came before. For example, whereas science fiction always had a penchant for long, quasi-melodramatic dialog and grandiose plots, Blade Runner introduced the minimalism of film noir, with punchy but sparse dialog and inwardly focused plots.

All of this was new and it showed that any story could be told as science fiction, not just stories about rocket ships. In fact, I would argue that Blade Runner actually demonstrated that science fiction was not so much its own genre, as it had always been understood to be, but was really a setting in which other genres could be played out. In other words, Blade Runner showed there is no such thing as a science fiction movie, there is instead a crime story, or mystery, or comedy, or love story set in a science fiction world.

It’s Great Because It Expands Your Mind

Finally, let’s finish with what makes Blade Runner such a great film. Beside the obvious, i.e. great acting, super writing, and eye-catching settings, it was the philosophical questions that lifted Blade Runner to another level. The primary question Blade Runner asks is what does it mean to be human. It does this through an examination of three characters: Deckard, Rachael and Roy.

Rachael (Sean Young) is a Replicant who doesn’t know she’s a Replicant. She works for the head of the Tyrell Corporation, the creator of the Replicants, and her life seems real enough. She has an apartment, a job, photos of her childhood, and even memories of growing up. She walks, talks, breathes, thinks and appears to experience the complete range of human emotions. Yet, she is a machine. But does that really matter? She seems human in every way. She is emotionally aware. She has no expiration date like the rest. And she doesn’t even know she’s a machine. So what makes her different than the humans around her?

Roy is easily the most interesting of the three; he’s also the most human (intentionally so). Roy is programmed to be an assassin, and he knows he’s a Replicant. He also knows he’s designed to expire after a five year lifespan, a safeguard put in place because Tyrell discovered Replicants would develop full-blown emotions after five years. . . a quicker time than human children mature. Roy desperately wants more life, and the way to get that, he thinks, is to confront his maker. But when Tyrell tells Roy it’s impossible to extend his life, Roy kills his creator. He then decides to toy with and kill Deckard as a form of spite for his own pending death. But at the last moment, just before Roy expires, he suddenly realizes the value of life and he saves Deckard from death. In effect, Roy fully matures from a mere tool to an emotional child to a fully-mature adult, which is a remarkable transformation for a machine.

Here we are given several issues to consider. First, we are asked what makes Roy not-human. Unlike Rachael (or even the other Replicants who came to Earth with Roy), Roy has fully repudiated the false past he was given. He’s also thrown off his programming and set about becoming his own man. He's an independent being with free will, and he craves life and, ultimately, comes to understand its value. In this way, Roy becomes more human than many real humans will ever be. Yet, he is a machine. So is he alive or isn’t he? And what makes him so? Also, what of Roy’s relationship with his creator? What does Roy killing his creator say about Roy’s independence and ours? Would we lash out the same way if we learned that our creator was some flawed, mortal creature? Would that set us free or would it lessen us?

Lastly, we come to Deckard, the human we use for comparison. But there’s a problem with Deckard. . . we’re not actually sure he’s human. At no point does Blade Runner ever say or even openly suggest that Deckard is not human, but the evidence is there. He has no real life outside of his job and no past about which we learn. He has memories of childhood and photos, but they are very similar to Rachael’s packaged memories. He’s emotionless, cold, and functional, i.e. he’s machinelike. Moreover, the one character we know to be human, because he’s physically defective, is Gaff (Edward James Olmos), and Gaff treats Deckard with disdain much as if he knows Deckard is merely a deluded machine. So is Deckard human or not? We don’t know and that’s the beauty of the writing. We are left to try to justify his humanity in ways that differentiate him from Roy and Rachael, and in the process we explore what it is that makes us human and alive.

Finally, one last issue worth discussing is hinted at throughout the film: why make Replicants at all? Why not just make functional robots, rather than making them look and act human? One possible explanation involves the purposes to which these Replicants were put -- “off world hit squad” and “pleasure model,” i.e. because they would need to blend in. But what does that say about us? It’s easy to see these as purposes to which we would actually put androids, but that means we would be striving to put ourselves on a par with God, only to use our greatest achievement (creatures created in our own image) to satisfy our basest instincts or our most evil desires. That doesn’t say much for us, does it? And what does it say that we don’t even give these creatures free will? As self-made God, we certainly seem to come up short. So could we create real Replicants to achieve only our better instincts? Would we? And if they are alive for all practical purposes, should we even try to create them, given our obvious flaws?

These are the kinds of questions Blade Runner raises and we can spend hours debating them. Indeed, this is where science fiction draws its strength, in its ability to ask these questions without angering the audience by insulting their faith, or race, or gender, or whatever. And by injecting these kinds of questions into what would otherwise be a simple story about a police officer hunting some escaped killers, this film suddenly takes on a level of depth that makes this more than just a film; it becomes an educational experience, as we are asked to examine our own beliefs and thereby understand ourselves a little bit better.

And that makes it pretty darn cool.

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Film Friday: Impostor (2002)

Impostor is a little-known movie staring Gary Sinise, Vincent D’Onofrio and Madeleine Stowe. It’s an enjoyable film for the most part, with excellent acting, good sets, and an engaging enough story. But it has a serious flaw that bothers me to no end, a flaw that is common to much science fiction: failure to think practically.

** spoiler alert **

Based on the Phillip K. Dick short story of the same name, Impostor is the story of scientist Spencer Olham as he struggles to prove he’s human. The story is set in the near future at a time when the Earth is at war with an evil alien race. Oldham (Sinise) is developing a super weapon. The story begins as Oldham recounts his weekend get away with his wife to his best friend and fellow scientist Nelson (Tony Shalhoub). His wife Maya (Stowe) runs the local military hospital.

As Oldham and Nelson go about their business, which includes preparing for a formal visit from the Prime Minster, a security team shows up, led by Major Hathaway (Vincent D’Onofrio). Hathaway claims his security forces intercepted an alien transmission, which revealed that Sinise is a replicant, i.e. he’s an organic machine that has been grown to think, act, look and feel like Oldham. Moreover, these machines don't even know they're machines, they actually think they're the people they replaced. And deep inside each replicant is a nuclear bomb waiting to go off when the replicant comes into contact with their target -- though the bombs can't be detected until they are ready to explode. Essentially, these replicants are unsuspecting, nuclear suicide bombers.

Hathaway’s job is to catch these replicants before they activate and explode. Thus, he plans to cut Sinise open to remove the bomb before it can explode. But Sinise isn’t down with that plan, so he escapes. The rest of the movie involves Sinise running from Hathaway, trying to enlist the aid of his wife, and trying to get a full body medical scan done of his body so he can prove he's human. Along the way, he befriends Mekhi Phifer, who lives outside of the dome in the ghetto and who wants to steal medicine to help the people the government forgot.

I won’t tell you the ending because I think you might enjoy the movie and some of the twists and turns near the end. Sinise is a great actor who gives his all. D’Onofrio isn’t far behind. The effects are good, and interestingly, many of the ideas in this story also appear in Minority Report, another Phillip Dick story made into a movie in 2002.

So what’s the problem? The problem arises when you start thinking about how the aliens are using the replicants. Ostensibly, the aliens are using the replicants because they have no other way to reach targets on Earth because the Earthers built domes around their cities as soon as the war began. By replacing people with these suicide-bombing replicants, however, the aliens can destroy targets on Earth. And that’s the film’s hook.

But it’s also kind of stupid. These aliens have found a way to replace anyone and smuggle nuclear bombs anywhere on Earth. So they come up with an elaborate plan to replace Sinise, let him wander around for a couple days until he meets the Prime Minister and then blow up? Hello! These are nuclear bombs! Are these aliens stupid? Why not just replace a couple hundred janitors. Tell them to report for work. The moment they all clock in at 9:00 am, POOF. . . no more cities.

This is a problem that is particularly common to science fiction. Too many times, the writers focus on their one really cool idea and they never really think about the world that surrounds it or how rational people would use their idea. It’s Rube Goldbergian. It’s like the idea that the government does secret scientific testing at midnight on animals belonging to unsuspecting farmers in Montana. . . when they could just as easily buy a dozen cattle and do the same test in the comfort of a private lab. It’s like the idea that brilliant James Bond villains need to invent elaborate ways to kill Jimmy B. . . when they could just shoot him. Yes, it creates a plot point, but not a valid one.

I’m not saying the idea of nuclear replicants isn’t a good one. I think it is. It just didn’t make a lot of sense how the aliens used it.

Think rationally people, you’ll make better movies.

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