Blade Runner Spinner Car models...  

Indeed, Blade Runner is a...
Indeed, Blade Runner is a design film. Harrison Ford has declared it one of his worst films for that reason.

H.Ford has always seemed to have...
an extraordinary and, at least on the surface, an inexplicable dislike of Blade Runner.
Blade Runner, though a pretty flawed story from a construction standpoint, remains an endlessly fascinating and watchable movie, at least to me. Some movies are like this.
I suspect that Ford dislikes Blade Runner so much in part, because he was/is a carpenter by training and so he prefers and appreciates well-constructed, carefully finished things in general. He views movies as custom cabinetry. They have a certain function. They have a certain structure. They ought to be constructed out of fine materials with an exceptionally high level of finish, and craftsmen shouldn't cut corners about them. In other words, don't build a cabinet, or in this case, make a movie, regardless of whether the movie is popular entertainment, or a narrow audience indie, unless you are going to take the time and care to do it right. Ford the carpenter hated having to go out and sell a slipshod, half finished film, regardless of how great it looked.

cont.
Of course, 99 percent of the movie business, and 99 percent of all trade work, is not done based on best effort. So: Harrison tended to work with Lucas and Spielberg (and not Ridley Scott of Blade Runner), not just because Lucas and Spielberg were popular and profitable (of course it didn't hurt), but because, even though they largely made updated cliff hanger serials together, each Lucas and Spielberg movie story is constructed as sturdily as a brick out house (always coherence over dazzle in the story construction and dialogue) and the production values are much higher than most other movies of comparably phenomenal budgets. Their mentalities were/are: the best chance a movie has occurs if it is easily understood and very well made. Easily understood means, assuming a sufficiently compelling quest plotted elegantly (not too much, not too little), the audience can then be carried along effortlessly through a finely crafted, state of the art visual experience. This is basically the same model Hitchcock advocated. They even rely on Hitchcock's McGuffin concept albeit with the twist of making what the McGuffin is crucial. But nothing, not even the McGuffin, must get in the way of the visual experience of the movement of pictures.
All the great directors understand that good movies achieve a delightful balance between the narrative logic of the brain and the visual side of the brain. This balance is what makes movies so incredibly compelling and satisfying at least during and briefly afterwards. Novels last longer with us, because they engage our imaginations for a much longer time and more creatively. Regardless, the movie story is largely the technique of opening (and keeping open) minds and eyes to the willing suspension of disbelief required for the cinemeatic visual experience (the choreography of moving light on a flat screen). No story, or bad story (unsympathetic protagonists struggling to achieve things that aren't worthwhile with too easily surmountable odds), or incoherent story (too much plot here, not enough there, too many plots, cuts without both visual and story connection, etc.), or even a marvelous but too complex story must dare impede the cinematic experience.

cont.
If you take into account what I just described above, you can see that Blade Runner would infuriate Harrison Ford. Here was a solid paranoid detective story in science fiction (with the twist of a love story with an android based on a short story by Phillip K. Dick lavished with rich production budget and an almost unprecedented and fresh (at the time) look botched by Ridley Scott's simultaneous ineptitude with story telling. Scott then really lacked the visual story telling skill needed to handle a full length picture of this magnitude(he was a maker of commercials and Alien, aka Jaws in a can). Because Ridley probably didn't care much about traditional Hollywood story construction in those days (they all learn eventually that it is critical, or they don't last), he probably thought he could get away with veering away from the script, and cutting with razzle dazzle and disconnection the same way he did in the bone head simple horror picture that was alien. A monster picture is simple. Monster bad. Hero good. Kill the monster. Detective stories, if any good, hinge more so than any other film stories on plot twists and character. This is why there are so few good detective stories. Everyone likes a good mystery, but it is harder than hell to tell a mystery via film gesture and film dialogue. Robert Towne, who wrote Chinatown, came to be called a genious simply because he could do it once. But back to Ford and Blade Runner.
Ford probably signed onto Blade Runner thinking Spielberg (or some experience director he admired) would direct it. Spielberg probably backed out. Ford believed it could be a terrific scifi detective movie. Scott's Alien was cool. The Duellists was not horrible for a first movie. He figures Ridley is young but talented and takes a chance. The shoot is laborious, because this was all before easy CG, and he and Ridley have so-so chemistry and the reputedly imminently sensible Mr. Ford has to spend quite some time with the reputedly hugely unsensible actress whose name I cannot recall right now. Scott gets lost in the magnificience of the look of his movie, because the plot was too thin to begin with, and he keeps not listening to Ford saying,"yea, that's a neat idea, but this thing is not going any single place, its incoherent, because its put together lousy." Ford was reputedly always equally blunt with Lucas and Spielberg, but they already had the talent and experience necessary to understand that he was, despite his grumpiness, a very good carpenter's square sensor for when the construction and production were getting out of true, whether or not he could fix it. Ridley, had less self-confidence and more arrogance than Lucas and Spielberg, and that is a deadly combination. Ridley at that time was not much more than a talented cinematographer. So: he probably got defensive and plowed ahead toward "his vision."

cont.
Plowing toward visions sometimes produce fascinating, but often only marginally coherent movies. Blade Runner is one. Michael Cimino's The Deer Hunter is another that was altogether better, despite being grotesquely misshapen in plot construction. It is kind of like that Gothic piece of furniture no one can help liking. Heaven's Gate is a third that in the end vascillated between the incomprehensible and the too on the nose boring. It is like that huge, ghastly Victorian vanity that some hack added some camel humps to and no one can make any sense of at all.
Blade Runner is just too freaking visually cool not to like and the idea of a gum shoe bagging a sexy robot in the sack is just too titillating not to watch (thanks to that hauntingly beautiful but loony actress that played her). She is the equivalent male joke to the female joke about the ideal man--a wallet with a penis attached. She is a really beautiful robot with a vagina attached. But fascinating fascinating heroines and fascinating looks aside, Blade Runner is not coherent and the studio had enough money bet on red on this picture at the multiplex casino, that they wanted knuckle-dragger coherent. So: they and Ridley compromised and added a voice over, which not only proved Ford's point about the poor construction, but also incensed him at having to patch a potentially fine high tech cabinet with some cheap knotty pine. Ridley didn't have enough balls to go back and do the movie right and caved into the studio. Ford's mug and early brand name was on the can and he knew his career was going to take the hit. It did. He had to do a lot of popular entertainments at that point to make up for the "fascinating to watch" but deadly bomb that was Blade Runner.
He probably knocks Blade Runner, because all the praise for it accrues to a a guy who left him high and dry to take the hit for it.

cont.
Also, it is an insult to the word "design" to say that Blade Runner is a "designed" movie and not a good movie. Well designed things in any realm do what they are supposed to do well and beautifully.
Too call Blade Runner a well-designed movie suggests the same to me as when someone says, "that Wright chair is a beautiful design." Its means it is a lousy chair to sit in that looks good. Or some building that has exceedingly pleasing Bauhaus form language, but is a bitch to put up with and maintain.
I do not like design to be talked of in this way, certainly not in the nascent stages of a functional revival.
Let's move on, shall we.
Regarding Blade Runner, though, I don't have any trouble sitting through it. It works well enough for me. But don't make me watch it, while sitting in most of Wright's chairs. The old functionalist just didn't do chairs as well as he did buildings IMHO.
But that's okay, Ridley Scott didn't do detective stories as well as he did monster pictures.
No one is a genius at everything.
And only a few geniuses realize that...say, like Hitchcock, who just quit doing anything but Hitchcock suspensers. 🙂
THE END

There are so many versions of Blade Runner, but...
...this Makoto Komatsu's drinking(?) glass looks familiar.
http://www.moma.org/collection/browse_results.php?criteria=O%3AAD%3AE%3A...

Two Words...
Sean Young ...God,she was gorgeous in that film.