Blade Runner

People die. Wow, that’s a downer. I actually didn’t expect that to be my opener for this. Don’t go reading too much into that. I mean, we could come up with all manner of things to say about the statement and know that I really didn’t have to start with it. I chose to do it. I just didn’t put the thought into it that it probably needed. Main thing with that, there is a bit more to unpack in here that we will be getting into in a minute or two.

The morose thought comes at the time around Rutger Hauer passing into the great beyond. The man was in his mid 70s, you have to expect that death is around the corner at that age. We know it comes for us all. But even then, it is a shock when it finally comes.

The announcement of his death didn’t hit me as hard as some others that have passed on in the past few years. I’m not talking about family and friends, this is celebrity deaths. The end of people that we know from their work instead of knowing them as an active part of our lives. These people that we watch and listen to and read about, they are as much a part of our lives as family we talk to, but it’s different than what we experience on a daily basis. It’s a passive experience but due to how our mind collects experience, they remain a part of us.

But I may have lost where I was going with all of this…

So yeah, Rutger Hauer passed away. I remember so many of the movies I saw him through the years. Of course, the favorite will always be the original Blade Runner. I picked that one up as digital a few years back. And I return to it every now and then.

When I first bought the movie, I had gotten the director’s cut. Yeah, that isn’t the movie that I wanted. I had to make some calls to return that one in exchange for the theatrical release. The way I first experienced the story is the way I prefer to experience the story.

I remember the arguments that came out so long ago. The original was something a bit different than the written story and the director’s cut was closer to the written work… yada yada yada. The original was something special to me. It was the lynch pin that connected the old pulp detective stories with the more modern look of cyber futurism. It was something more than just cyberpunk. The connections to the old and the new made for a story I still enjoy 37 years after I first saw the movie.

And the funny thing is, I have the book. I’ve yet to read it. I found it at a yard sale a while back. I’m still not sure when I will take the time to pull it off the shelf and dig into the words. I guess I am still more attached to that original way I came into the story.

I was ten when it was originally in theaters. This was back in a time when the only way you could really see movies was to catch them in the theater. Sure they might come to television at some point but all the good bits would be removed and then you had to contend with commercials. Nope, for me it was always time in the theater. Sometimes we would pay full price but most of the time we would hit up 99 cent Tuesdays. Lines for the best movies would stretch for at least a block away from the ticket counter. So much a different world back then.

I don’t know that I really spent much time talking about the movie in all of this. It is one of my favorites that I like to dig into every now and then. But at this point I think if you haven’t seen it yet, you probably have no plans to see it. Thirty-seven years and its on digital and you can probably even find it on dvd if not blue-ray.

As a last bit on the whole of it, there is a part that stands out to me and has for a while now. There is a scene where Rick Deckard (Harrison Ford) is using a computer to search through some photos. First the quality of the photos is horrible. And then how slow it all is, its been so long since we fought with such things. Blowing up images and searching photos now is so easy we don’t even think about it anymore. Hell, people tend to have more photos on their phones now than what they could have held on a floppy disk back when the movie came out, and no one even thinks of a time like that anymore.

I think I might have spoken about the way our tech in movies has changed over the years and not often keeping up with what we have now. So I am not going to spend anytime waxing about it now. I guess at this point it is more to say, I will miss Rutger Hauer and I am saddened at the loss. His contribution to cinema created a legacy of great films. If you haven’t seen anything he was in, what the heck is wrong with you?

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