Galactic Review: Blade Runner Ultimate 5-Disc DVD + the Premiere of Razor

Blade Runner and Battlestar Galactica are two sides of the same coin, reflecting fears of what effect runaway technology may have on humanity in the near future.  In both cases humans are obsolete, in Blade Runner because of something we’ve lost, in Battlestar Galactica because we are being replaced by the next evolutionary step.  Either way, it’s a reflection of the continuing human unease with the rapid technological changes in our lives.  

 

Two of the most anticipated entertainment events pending in 2007 are the release of the Blade Runner Ultimate 5-Disc DVD set and the premiere of Razor, the harbinger of the fourth and final season of Battlestar Galactica.  In what is perhaps merely an interesting coincidence (or at least conceivably a convergence those of a magical bent would call a synchronicity), both properties are driven by the same underlying theme: the fear that man will be overrun by his own creations. 

The parallels are interesting: in each show, creatures created by humans to serve mankind as slaves rise against humanity.  On the surface they seem intent on simply destroying us.  This conceit drives the action in each story, at least in the shallowest literal sense.  In Blade Runner artificially-created replicants jump a shuttle and return to Earth from the offworld colonies, attempting to infiltrate the Tyrell Corporation that created them and, in the process, killing lots of people.  Similarly in Galactica, a new breed of Cylons appears forty years after the end of the Human-Cylon war seemingly intent on eradicating humanity.  Two shows, two kinds of artificial beings killing regular folks that must be retired or fragged by our heroes. These are fairly straightforward action-adventure conceits.

What isn’t nearly as straightforward is the subtext that distinguishes these two works from their lesser-regarded rivals.  While it’s true that both these project feature great scripts, cutting-edge special effects and brilliant acting, what really distinguishes these properties is their thematic resonance, the quality of tapping into a vibe, slotting into the gestalt, giving form to a deeper theme that resonates with the audience’s own unspoken concerns.

Just as fears of atomic annihilation gave rise to a whole series of mutated giant bug movies in the 50’s, I would argue that Blade Runner and Battlestar Galactica tap into a common fear, one much subtler than the fear of death.  While these artificial antagonists do seek to kill humans at first glance, what may be far more disturbing is the notion that their true agenda seems to be replacing us. 

When you think about it, this fear of being replaced, of becoming obsolete as a species, is a fear unparalleled in human history.  In the past nation states might be overthrown, companies driven out of business, jobs lost, but fundamentally the issue of the intellectual/spiritual supremacy of humanity AS humanity was…well, not an issue.  If there were ever Neanderthal/Cro Magnon /Homo Sapiens wars for ascendancy, the relevance of those battles is long lost to us.  And even if that fear still resonates in the collective subconscious, it’s still a horse of a different color…it’s not as if any of these factions suddenly materialized out of nowhere in a burst of technological fire. These conflicts would’ve been more akin to existing tribal turf wars or racial conflicts than the sudden appearance of a new evolutionary stage so advanced as to be unfathomably alien. 

Yet given the breakneck pace of advances in cloning, artificial intelligence and the bioengineering of new life forms, it’s no wonder that this newest form of existential angst should enjoy a special seat of fascination in our psyches.  Blade Runner and Battlestar Galactica both tap into the same general sense of unease with technology, that novel feeling that humans may be diminished by it…or replaced all together. 

In Blade Runner, “More human THAN human” is the Tyrell Corporation’s motto, and clearly that’s the issue at the heart of the film.  As Deckard, Harrison Ford portrays a man who is dead emotionally. “Sushi,” he muses in voiceover at the very start of the film.  “That’s what my ex-wife called me.  Cold fish.”  Indeed, most of the human beings depicted in the film are cold, distant, unemotional.  Holden is a bureaucrat, Bryant a heartless bastard, Gaff an enigmatic and remote figure, Tyrell a stuffy egomaniac.  These people represent the current state of mankind…humans who have lost something fundamental to their humanity.  J.F. Sebastian fares a little better.  As the creator of a menagerie of sentient toys to serve as his friends, Sebastian has a childlike emotional vulnerability belied by his premature physical decrepitude.  He is sentimental and caring…and it is no accident that he is the only human being the replicants associate with during the film, the subtext being…what?  That he’s more open to the replicants? Or that they associate with him because he’s more like them?

With the exception of Sebastian, the other humans are unemotional, joyless…much like you would expect the artificial replicants to be. Yet it is intentional that the most human moments in the film are provided by the replicants themselves.

When Zhora runs for her life, her face registers any number of emotions…rage, fear, sorrow.  Leon risks everything to retrieve his precious photos…evidence of sentiment.  Pris and Roy share the kind of passion that with time could blossom from this inexperienced beginning to actual love.  And Rutger Hauer’s death on the roof is without a doubt the emotional core of the film…the one truly moving moment in the entire narrative.  Without this scene, Blade Runner would be a stylish but ultimately empty special effects exercise.  Roy’s final speech, laden with fond regret that all he is should be lost in time “like tears in rain” illustrates to us that in this film, as humans, we have been replaced by our betters.  Not only physically stronger and more mentally acute, these usurpers have rediscovered what we have lost, and so as the dominant species on Earth we are doomed.

Much speculation and many angry posts have addressed the debate over whether Deckard is human or replicant.  Given that by the end of the film Deckard discovers emotions long dormant inside himself, the idea that he is a replicant (a position taken by director Ridley Scott himself and textually supported at various points in the film) perfectly supports this theme.  As a replicant who could not learn to feel among humans, Deckard only finds the best part of himself in the company of others like himself, the future inheritors of the Earth, the replicants.

The fear of losing our humanity and being replaced as humans gives way to a slightly different variation of that theme in Battlestar Galactica.  Whereas in Blade Runner we created the Replicants to resemble humans, in Galactica we created the original crude metallic Cylons, who then in turn reinvented THEMSELVES in our image.  In Blade Runner, because the Replicants are the only characters that seem to have genuine emotional moments on screen, in a sense they ARE more human than human, and by reminding us of the humanity we’ve lost, they have already replaced us. 

In Galactica, it’s a different situation. The Cylons have not replaced us as humans.  The people on board the Battlestar are warm, emotional beings and, if anything, the Cylons are groping for ways to understand and develop their newfound emotional responses.  Early in the first season, as they are hunting down humans, one of them asks Number 6, the Cylon who seduced Baltar and infiltrated the human defense systems, what it’s like to feel love.  One gets the sense that these artificial beings are overwhelmed by their burgeoning emotions and sensations.

In a very real sense, the Cylons are mankind’s children, and like children they are driven by the conflicting drive to both emulate and reject their parents.  It is significant, even a bit poignant, that in choosing the direction of their evolution they selected humans as their models.  They chose to be as much like us as they could be, rather than embracing and perfecting some silicon equivalent.  They are equal or superior to us mentally and physically, but they are still developing emotionally and spiritually.  One could look at their attempts to strike us down, to bring us low, as an adolescent need to separate from the parents.  Symbolically the Cylon children feel rejected by their human parents, exiled in a sense after the war, and they have now returned, like bad children, to “act out” in rage, to show the parents that they really aren’t all that important, to knock us down a peg. 

Indeed, the Cylons have a great deal of adolescent ambivalence toward us.  Although they were intent on destroying us in their first fit of anger, since the first season they have mellowed.  When they gain control of the balance of humanity in the second and third seasons and drive Pegasus and Galactica away, they don’t methodically exterminate the humans under their care.  No, in their inexperienced emotional way, they attempt to find a way to live with us, albeit on their terms. They put up with the resistance, sabotage, hatred, all the while trying to find a way to reconcile their conflicting feelings about us.

This is the heart of the show, and its unspoken logical conclusion strikes at a fear similar to but more profound than the fear at the core of Blade Runner.  The replicants are a new and better breed of human, but in the Cylon’s case their capacity to entirely eclipse us as a species is virtually a certainty.  Think – in the mere space of 40 years, they have gone from one-eyed tin cans to the shapely curves of Number 6, leaping an almost unfathomable evolutionary chasm from the mechanical to the biomechanical.  So given that incredible evolutionary curve, where will they be in another 40 years?  In that time they will be at least as far above us as we were above the tin can Cylons of the first Cylon war.  In “Errand of Mercy”, the first season of original Star Trek, Kirk and Spock encounter the Organians, pure energy beings “as far above us on the evolutionary scale as we are above the amoeba”. 

Such is the projection here, a situation where our own creation may not only equal us, but dwarf us.

Posted by Gil Austin.