Blade Runner, Final Cut (1982): Part 1, Imax

The two of us who decided to watch the final cut of Blade Runner at BFI Imax in Waterloo are not humans to laugh in the face of the epic.

We knew the screen would be extremely large. The ambition behind Blade Runner is extremely large. This, the final cut, represents the climax of its director’s notoriously fastidious efforts to render the vision he had in his head. It was not an evening for half measures.

We met at 9 and went from a pub on to TGI Friday’s for dinner. Why? Why? A preposterous question. Strange, exciting foodstuffs of every gleam and gloss-laden wing and honey-coated flesh all in the contemptuous glow of thin neon and the thrall of multiple staff-led happy birthday singings by unhappy faces to complete strangers. All was well until, suddenly, disaster! It was 11.50! The film had started twenty minutes ago! No, it couldn’t be. It was! Speed and confusion reigned, the bill was dispatched, a taxi bundled into.

Then, a disaster that made its predecessor look like a blessing: the automatic doors wouldn’t open! The box office was deserted, no sign of human life. My spirit died, and I turned to go. But what was this? My companion had GRIPPED THE DOORS LIKE A MIGHTY APE AND PRISED THEM APART WITH HIS BARE HANDS! There was no time for jubilation: a security guard approached. Our hastily prepared lies melted away when he asked how he could help. We were in. Still a major hurdle ahead though – how would we find our seats in the darkened throng?

There it was, the screen that seemed too big to be real and a sea of feebly lit faces. Should we just go down to the front, we whispered to the usher? She wasn’t one to buck the procedure. She shone a torch on our tickets and then along a solid rank of people to where our seats were. She gestured us onwards, and so began the painful drama of ‘excuse me, sorry, can I get past’ and contortion and shuffling along the aisle… but we were being called back. We shuffled back to the usher who told us that further torch investigation had revealed the ugly truth: our seats were taken. More whispered discussion. We went down to the front. It did not escape me that we were very late, making noise, shining a torch around and generally creating a hideous distraction in a cinema full of the kind of people who were prepared to pay quite a lot of money for the privilege of seeing a revered sci-fi classic, in its long-awaited ultimate form, on the biggest screen Britain has ever known. A vision of rabid geeks and cinephiles setting upon us like a pack of wild dogs came to me…

Happily, it was only our minds that were torn apart, before being refashioned. I saw the film many years ago and failed to see what all the fuss was about, but I think I may just have been too young. Only one moment jarred, a bit of credibility crunching zooming in on a detail of an image. Apart from that, Ridley Scott does pretty well resisting the techno-porn-and-alien-monsters trap that has seduced many a sci-fi adventurer, and exploits what the genre has to offer. The meticulously created, absorbing weirdness of Blade Runner’s dystopic world repeatedly prompted a question that is always a good sign: ‘how did they do that?’. The climax proves how good ol’ Ridley’s judgement once was: the bag of tricks is put to one side in favour of Rutger Hauer’s rain-drenched face, whispering his deathless death speech:

“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 moments will be lost in time… like tears in rain. Time… to die.”

We boggled at that 26-metre-by-20-metre face saying these things and rather than blurt out, ‘ABSURD!’, we were moved, actually moved by the huge pure unrelenting ’80s power of that gigantic Dutch face. We had forgotten there was disbelief to suspend.

To conclude, those closed automatic doors represent the barrier to what we must do to break through to wonder, the unknown and victory. You may lose heart, wishing to walk away aghast and defeated and inwardly cowed and unfairly broken. I beseech you, in the name of all that is good, for the sake of your compatriot next to you on the verge of despair themselves, pull those doors open. The future, projected to many times its normal size, awaits.

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