Cutting Edge

"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. Now, all those moments will be lost in time, like.. tears. In rain. Time to die."  Any sci fi fan will instantly recognise these few seminal lines of prose and be transported back to that rooftop in the closing moments of Ridley Scotts film. When I first came across Blade Runner it was via a last minute purchase at a Liverpool comic mart. I had a few quid burning a hole in my pocket and hadn't found much to buy apart from that months Micronauts comics, so I treated myself to a small paperback book for an upcoming film - the Blade Runner Sketchbook. I had to admit at the time it didn't exactly look inspiring, no huge spaceships or giant robots and the designs and drawings even included retrofitted pushbikes. However, being a huge fan of Scotts earlier epic, Alien, I thought i'd give it the benefit of the doubt. It was some time before I found myself seated in the cinema finally watching the film and within minutes any doubts I had about the film fled. I have to admit though BR has been a slow burner with me over the years, the many layers of meaning and amount of background detail meant that it really only came into its own after the advent of dvd - this was the first one I bought - and the clarity of picture brought the film to renewed life. Since then, I found the Directors Cut and more recently a five disk boxed set of the Ultimate edition, which finally showed all the parts that had ended on the cutting room floor. The unicorn scene was restored as was Deckards steamy love scene with Rachel and as I had always been a huge fan of her character in the film, seeing a little more of her was very rewarding. However, besides losing the stupid voice over one of the best parts for me was the very end when Roy Batty finally succumbs to his 'accelerated decriptitude' and loses his grip on life. As he releases the dove at the end of the standard version, its seen to fly off into a daytime sky against a backdrop of modern factory buildings - a huge continuity gaff. But in the boxed set, this is replaced by a matte of classic retrofitted buildings in the style that we see all the way through the long dark night of L.A. The only other gripe I had with BR which was never corrected was the re-use of the vdu display graphics on the Spinner control panel - the imagery from the separation sequence of the Nostromo from the refinery in Alien is used prominently, including the outline graphic of the docking collar which seems to be intended to reflect the roof of the police HQ building. The the word 'PURGE' appears quite incongruently on the Spinner screen, this having been recycled from the countdown sequence on the Nostromo after Ripley shuts down the reactor cooling system to blow the ship.

Moaning aside, BR remains a classic and favourite film of mine and it had a profiund influence on me. When I picked up the BR Souvenir mag, I found an ad for ERTL toys in it showing cool diecasts of the four main vehicles. Being a US mag, the toys weren't in the shops here, so I wrote to ERTLs UK offices and they kindly sent me the four models for a reasonable cost. They are about the same size as Matchbox/Hot Wheels cars and quite detailed. There is a Police Spinner, Deckards Spinner, Deckards Ground Car and Rachels Spinner. Until I got the dvd edition, I had no idea where Rachels Spinner featured in the film, but the increased clarity allowed me to spot it flying just ahead of the police spinner after Deckard is on his way to meet Bryant.

Probably my favourite thing about BR was the set dressing. The amount of subtle detail in the sets from the broom on the roof of Bryants office to the photographs set into his lampshade and the objet d'art decorating Deckards piano and littering his apartment, was amazing. One item I found especially cool was the sawfish jaw on the wall near the front door - clearly visible when Rachel hurriedly leaves after Deckard bluntly informs her she is a replicant. It was shortly after the release of the film that I found such a thing myself, albeit quite dilapidated and a little smaller, on a junk stall in Speke market! Needless to say, after gluing a couple of the teeth back in and rounding off the broken end of the 'nose' it spent a good few years proudly displayed on my wall.