The look and feel of a film is usually all to do with the production’s budget. Big-budget Hollywood blockbusters which have heavy reliance on visual effects are nonetheless more clearer-looking and audible that your average run-of-the-mill ultra-low-budget independent movie. This has less to do with blockbuster directors having more money and better resources at their disposal than independent filmmakers wanting nothing to do with the studio system. However, independent does not mean backward. Rather, filmmakers like George Lucas – whose Star Wars series have not only been wildly financially successful, but a breakthrough in computer-generated visual effects and digital filmmaking – have brought about some of the most influential (and, as some purists would say, hazardous) changes to the cinematic landscape, and have caught up by utilizing cheaper facilities, a bandwagon non-independent filmmakers have of course since jumped on. The films Blade Runner and Mad Max respectively represent each of these film “rivals,” and together they show how the two are not so different.
If Socrates lived today and made films, it is probable he would have made Blade Runner. Blade Runner is a maddeningly philosophical science-fiction film, also throwing in elements of cyberpunk and future neo-noir, with characters who are so enigmatic yet enjoyably deep whose secrets are known neither to them or to us. They are all traditional film-noir character stereotypes seemingly trapped in a futuristic science-fiction world divided by humans and illegal human replicants.
Blade Runner opens with a sky-view shot of the dystopia of 2019 Los Angeles in all its blinding decadence: fire-lights, flying cars and hundred-storey skyscrapers illustrating the corporate greed and corruption of the jungle Los Angeles has evolved into. Declared illegal on Earth after a violent mutiny, criminal human clones dubbed “replicants” infest the streets below, which are already awash with homeless people, thugs and sex workers. And as a result of global warming, it is always raining.
Director Ridley Scott manages such a breakneck pace with the film that it really seems to make us understand clearer the limited life-span Eldon Tyrell, the creator of the replicants, has given his creations. Although it is not technically set in real time, in the way protagonist Deckard, a cop assigned to execute fugitive replicants, completely and successfully goes about his task of apprehending five replicants throughout the film’s running time, it feels like it all happens over the course of just one night.
Blade Runner’s narrative structure is something of a pastiche of the film-noir and science-fiction genres. After a written prologue and the shot of future Los Angeles dystopia, it goes: 1) Deckard checking in to see what his chief wants of him; 2) Deckard interviewing suspected replicant and femme fatale Rachael; 3) a forbidden love growing between the two; 4) slimy replicant Roy Batty beginning to track down Deckard; 5) scantily-clad but butch replicant Pris searching the streets for accommodation; 6) Deckard hunting down another replicant in a brothel; 7) Deckard questioning whether he himself is a replicant; 8) Roy Batty killing his maker for failing to make him perfect; 9) Deckard facing off in an abandoned mansion against Roy and Pris; 10) Deckard and Rachael escaping to a peaceful and happy life together.
The underlying theme in Blade Runner of prejudice towards replicants is what complicates the sub-plot of the romance between Deckard and Rachael. Deckard is torn between carrying out his duty to his chief and showing unconditional love to Rachael. To make matters worse, Rachael of course has a lifespan which is rapidly running out, after which time Deckard will be on his own again.
Ever since Blade Runner’s release in 1982, fans and critics have been completely divided over the issue of whether or not Deckard himself is a replicant. Early in the story we are told all replicants have visions of unicorns and have to find out for themselves where they came from. In one scene, Deckard is confused by a dream of a unicorn from which he has just awoken, and later is intrigued by stick-figures of unicorns. And if he really is human, it could be arguable that he would not find himself physically and emotionally attracted to replicants like Rachael.
One thing almost every film ever produced has in common is a cause-effect framework – how one character’s actions, while either for good or evil, do as much harm as they do good. In Blade Runner, the creator of the replicants Eldon Tyrell, has set out to create perfection in a series of human clones and has failed. Given that the human characters in the film live longer than the replicants, the replicants are subsequently inferior. Roy Batty is aware of his inferiority to humans thanks to the mistakes with which Tyrell made him, and Roy murders his maker out of revenge. It is through this stark distinction between its human and replicant characters the film challenges us to define perfection, or even if there really is such a thing.
While most movies use narrative time simply to show characters going on a journey in just two hours, Blade Runner uses narrative time to show the shortness of life itself. Just as the lifespans of replicants have deadlines, so, too, do we all in our efforts to go about our business everyday. While an early scene involving replicant Leon’s execution of his human interrogator and Roy Batty’s killing of Tyrell illustrate this message of time running out everyday, perhaps the most subliminal depiction in the film of a character’s deadline is the ending (of the Director’s Cut version) with Deckard and Rachael leaving their apartment, possibly to escape to freedom and eternal bliss. This ending is ambiguous and anticlimactic and can be read both ways: that the two A) die soon, depending on whether or not Deckard is a replicant; or B) live happily ever after. Either way, we know the problematic aspect of their love affair has only just begun, and that they are about to find out just what the film itself suggests: that perfection is not exactly that, or it is nonexistent.
The 1979 science-fiction action classic Mad Max is remembered as one of the crucial films of the 1970s Australian film renaissance. Produced for under one million dollars and originally designed to make a loss, most experts cite George Miller’s film as the first major action movie produced in Australia, and its influence was even felt in Hollywood (albeit after the actors’ Australian accents were dubbed into American accents) – especially with star Mel Gibson’s meteoric rise to international superstardom.
Mad Max can perhaps be best described as a revenge movie worked around a post-Apocalyptic science-fiction action narrative. Max Rockatansky is a young cop patrolling a highway running through the sunburnt Australian Outback, sometime in the distant future. An upstanding citizen, Max does not shy away from giving speeding tickets to people who go over the speed limit, and then letting them go. However, after a sadistic road gang murders his wife and infant son, there’s no more Mr. Nice Guy. Now, as the tagline for the film goes, “When the gangs take over the highway…remember he’s on your side.”
The chase sequences in Mad Max highlight the effectiveness of fast editing and how it enables you to imagine yourself in the situation on-screen – basically, George Miller and his editor have helped you imagine what it’s like to be in a car chase just by watching the film, so you do not actually have to get involved in one. The crash sequences have the same impact, but are done to reassure us we are watching from a safe distance (there is a famous shot of a car ploughing into a caravan). This is especially the case in the climactic chase involving Max and the last surviving member of the antagonist Toecutter’s gang. Max does not catch him, but the gang member meets his maker when he crashes into a truck at top speed. For maximum intensity, Miller cuts back and forth between the gang member and the truck – with the gang member nearly jumping out of his skin when first he sees the truck – rather than focusing entirely on one or the other. This is done not to evoke sympathy for the gang member or even the truck driver, but simply to show how quickly a life can be cut short (and, of course, to ensure every loose end is tied up).
Mad Max’s depiction of the Australian Outback in its post-Apocalyptic state has the same effect as Blade Runner’s depiction of 2019 Los Angeles. It is so unmistakably stunning that it becomes another character, so much so that hints that the Outback really is like a futuristic world in its desolation and isolation. Of course, hopefully Mad Max will not have successfully predicted the future for humanity as a whole, but that is not the point. The point is that there will always be vigilantes who see injustice and fight it. The influence of Mad Max’s depiction of the Australian Outback as unforgiving beast is still felt today in contemporary films like 2005’s Wolf Creek.
In both films, environment is a key factor in their portrayal of the future, yet both are set in environments that could not be more strikingly different. Incorporating film-noir elements into its science-fiction narrative, Blade Runner takes place in 2019, which is very humid and always enjoying rainfall. This is a clear hint towards global warming – something that was only known of by weather experts at the time of the film’s release in 1982 – and also to the loss of memory and the past and the inhabitants of it, be they human or replicant, slipping further and further back into the annals of history. As Batty himself famously says immediately before he dies, “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 Tannhauser gate. All those memories will be lost in time, like tears in rain. Time to die.”
Mad Max, on the contrary, uses the killer heat and desolation of the Australian Outback as an allegory for what the aftermath of the Apocalypse might be like. It is an almost Satanic entity which causes individuals stuck in it to slowly lose their minds, and leaving them open to the gangs who worship the Outback so much so that it is practically their creator. But Max is no Christ-figure either, He, too, has been corrupted to a certain extent by the Outback, however this has instructed him to right the wrongs of his world as much as he can, to erase some of the damage the Apocalypse has inflicted upon the world.
Whether or not it is too late to prevent the scary depictions of the future Blade Runner and Mad Max each put forth – or if they were always inevitable – is something that only time will tell. That said, neither of these films are cautionary tales. And they are more than just subversive pieces of genre-fusion. Ultimately, both films are postmodernist essays on the repercussions of current events and ideologies, irrespective of what cultures and religions they come from or whether they are political or environmental. And refreshingly, neither end on a conveniently celebratory ending, because in the cases of these two films that would diminish the impact of their negative views of the future.
Blade Runner and Mad Max, both having assumed cult classic status, are fondly remembered by critics today as two science-fiction films that helped to usher in the postmodern feel of the genre that is so present today. Ignoring the lure of the Star Wars template for science-fiction movie storytelling, Ridley Scott and George Miller each gave us, in their respective films, a downbeat, cynical and uncompromising view of the future. Respectively, Scott and Miller, in their films, made us attempt to decipher the difference between human and non-human and ponder whether or not they are one and the same, and provided us with an utterly disturbing depiction of just what the prophesized Apocalypse might be like. While we can only hope for all our sakes Scott and Miller wrongfully predicted the future, all good science-fiction tries to predict it, and only the best do get it right.
BIBLIOGRAPHY
· Scott, R. 1982, Blade runner, Warner Bros. Pictures
· Miller, G. 1979, Mad Max, Kennedy-Miller Productions
· Bordwell, D., Thompson, K. 2004, Film art: an introduction, pp. 415-418 (template only)
Subscribe to:
Post Comments (Atom)
No comments:
Post a Comment