Ok, movie buffs, explain how Deckard from Blade Runner is a replicant

[Hawaii Hiker]

Because I don't get it...I know Ridley Scott said in an article Deckard was, but I can't figure it out..

I just rented the it from Net-Flix, they have 3 versions on it..The 1982 original, a 1982 international version, & the 1992 Director's cut...I still prefer the 1982 original to the director's cut..

Deckard had typical human emotions (anger, love, pain, etc.)...At the beginning, they said SIX replicants escaped from the off world colony (one was killed running thru an electric field) & the others were Batty, Leon, Pris, Zhora, & Rachel...

Much like I need the Matrix explained to me, :dunce: I need explained how in the world Deckard is a replicant, :dunce:

[flvegan]

1. I'm ready

:popcorn:

[bicentennial_baby]

2. Move over

:popcorn:

[tigereye]

21. this has to be the geekiest of issues....

other than debates about Star Trek or Dr. Who.... :rofl:

[TZ]

6. GEEK WAR!

:popcorn:

:rofl:

[Dr. Strange]

8. What war?

What self-respecting geek would lend credence to Scott's "idea"?

[TZ]

9. hmm.

I dunno. Ask Orrex. IIRC he has some thoughts on this topic! (See the endless Is XXX a replicant threads!):rofl:

[Dr. Strange]

10. Orrex supports Scott's theory.

Well, then, this geek war is nigh over!

[Dr. Strange]

3. He's not.

Basically, what it comes down to is this: Ridley Scott is a dick head. Not a Dick head, clearly, for if he were, he would not have suggested something so stupid. Philip K. Dick is turning in his grave, (and popping some Chew-Z).

[MrCoffee]

4. It's easy to explain

Ridley Scott doesn't know what the fuck he's talking about.

[redqueen]

7. Succinct and correct.

[Bake]

11. But ... uh ... wasn't he the director?

Like, it's HIS MOVIE?

Bake

[MrCoffee]

13. But Deckard isn't his character

Deckard is PKD's creation, and PKD is perfectly clear regarding Deckard's humanity.

Ridley Scott doesn't know what the fuck he's talking about.

[Bake]

15. I stand in awe of your geekitude.

:patriot:

Bake

[DS1]

5. Scott = Full of Kipple

[edbermac]

12. Deckard = Replicant = Ridley Scott = Marketing Ploy

Case closed.

[seemunkee]

14. There's another version

The Final Cut.
Various pieces of dialogue too have been inserted or altered. In an early scene, where Bryant and Deckard are looking over Nexus 6 profiles, Bryant now describes Leon’s job, and when he talks about replicants being caught in an electrical field, the dialogue has been changed from: "One of them got fried running though an electrical field" to "Two of them got fried running through an electrical field". This alteration fixes the problem of a sixth replicant unaccounted for in earlier versions.

[gmoney]

48. And it makes no sense for Deckard to have escaped with Roy and the others

Plus, isn't it essentially illegal for replicants to be on earth? If so, why would a police officer be one? Wouldn't a replicant blade runner side with replicants?

Of course what makes even less sense is why the only way to tell a replicant is with some obscure empathy test. Seems whatever "device" is in them to limit their lifespan to 4 years would also include some sort of RFID chip implant in the brain that could easily be scanned without the subject's knowledge.

Or did Ahnold cover this territory in "Total Recall" ?

[dysfunctional press]

52. "Wouldn't a replicant blade runner side with replicants?"

not if he didn't know that he was a replicant.

[Lethe]

16. i don't know *how*

but the very last scene in the director's cut strongly suggests that Deckard is a replicant. The cop places a origami unicorn at Deckard's house. Deckard has a reocurring dream with a unicorn in it. Coincidence?

I think it makes sense in a way, because why would you send a human to kill replicants? You would just create a replicant to do that. Too much risk for a human.

[tigereye]

20. you could also read it as a general comment on humanity and innocence, too

[redqueen]

22. I interpreted it as a symbol of an impossible thing.

As the chicken was a symbol of Deckard's cowardice. Deckard's pursuing love with a replicant is an impossible thing. He might have made a windmill.

The whole unicorn as evidence thing is ridiculous anyway. Rachael's memories were implanted, but dreams are not implanted... so how could Gaff know what Deckard dreamed about? What a load of nonsense...

[tigereye]

23. because Gaff was a replicant!

:rofl: :evilgrin:

[redqueen]

25. If that lying liar started spewing that lie to get more attention / $,

that would not surprise me at all. :)

[tigereye]

27. it's interesting to see how passionate people are about this -

What's wonderful is how complex the movie is and how much discussion it creates... One of my favorite films.

[tigereye]

28. well, I was thinking that not everything has to make rational sense in films

or even to parallel the original story.

You could even see the whole thing as an allegory, I suppose. (I've been looking at too many Remedios Varo paintings lately)

[redqueen]

29. Directors revise stories.

It happens all the time in movies, and only the fans of the writer will notice and find it irksome.

[tigereye]

30. sure, that's kind of how I felt about The Secret Life of Bees- worried that the

wonderful story would be spoiled, but the film was actually quite good and close to the book


For the same reason, I didn't go to see the movie Evening. Same problem. I just couldn't see how they would be able to capture the mood of the book.

[redqueen]

31. There was also a perception that he was doing it to cash in...

not sure but it seemed like this only came up when they were about to release the director's cut.

[tigereye]

34. regardless of why he made it, it's a seminal film

He's made some great films, before than and since, too.

[redqueen]

35. Oh don't get me wrong... I love it.

I couldn't stand that hackneyed voice over.

I just hate that he embellished the story with what IMO is easily-debunked, shallow nonsense.

[tigereye]

36. Funny how people probably wouldn't feel the need to debunk novels or poems

(well not until lately - our culture is so bizarre at times.) :( Sometimes art simply needs to be art. I don't know why it's so common for everyone to be playing "gotcha" all the time in the media and online.



I miss the voice-ove,r actually- it had a wonderfully 40's noir-ish quality - but I've gotten used to no voice-over in the re-make and it allows you to let the story tell itself in a more complex way.

[redqueen]

37. Because he's now changed it from a PKD story to HIS story.

The debunking is that Deckard was a replicant in the story. No, he was not, not in PKD's story.

In Ridley Scott's "new and improved" DADOES story, sure... fine... he's a replicant now.

[tigereye]

38. my point was that art finds it's own vantage point...

that's just the way it works sometimes. I don't know that Dick would have been surprised, given his views on the world. :rofl: Have you read his book about WWII being won by the Axis? Fascinating.



I just don't understand why people (not you, RQ, just in genera)l, have to always be debunking everything. Sometimes whatever text/ medium has to be what it is. :shrug:

[redqueen]

39. When it's made from someone else's material...

sure it can be what it is - in this case it is what it is - a wonderful story changed in a fundamental way (and for the worse IMO).

[blueraven95]

45. I don't believe there is anything wrong

in looking at all art critically - and asking if the artist has been true to the art he or she is creating. It is appropriate to have these conversations about all art, including movies, novels, poems, visual art, theatre, music, etc. It's how we create our own personal standards and come to better understand of the world around us.

There is almost nothing I resent more than a storyline being poorly manipulated where it shouldn't have been. In my personal opinion, Scott's announcement was nothing more than "author" (as director, he is, in a sense, the author of the movie) manipulation at it's most heinous, and I find it tragic - particularly because the film works beautifully while the story makes sense, but doesn't work so well through Scott's post release, manufactured vision of it.

[tigereye]

46. I have no problem with analyzing art critically - but some of the things

masquerading as criticism seem like playing "gotcha" to me. I think Scott is a really cool film-maker and viewing his work only through the subtext of comments he made after the fact doesn't look at the whole gestalt of the work, I guess. And it raises very ineresting questions about what "being true" to the art, in whatever form, means in this deconstructionist era. A good example would be writers using previous novels as jumping-points for their own novels (which isn't new, but seems to happen a lot with films currently), such as The Hours and other post-modernist treatings of classic novels. I'm not always sure how I feel about those works, some of them are great and imaginative and others seem to cheapen the original, but are very trendy in the literary world.

[Lethe]

26. you have to take into account the direction

of the directors cut.

Why show the unicorn dream at all then? It has nothing to do with the plot. Why show him looking at the photographs of his relatives. Why does Bryant force him into being a Bladerunner, saying "you're not cop you're little people. no choice." The leaving of the unicorn origami, then dramatic emphasis on a thoughtful Deckard, and Gaff's echoing line. Deckard's eyes are shown with the orange glow like the other replicants and the owl.

There's no way of knowing if they could implant dreams or not. The unicorn obviously had significance to Deckard.

IMO the Director's cut definitely points you towards the conclusion that Deckard is a replicant.

[jobycom]

32. The final unicorn dream and the lack of a voiceover show that Ridley wanted it that way.

I don't know about the "little people" line, since Deckard didn't know he was a replicant until he saw the unicorn and realized that Gaff was telling him he had memory implants. Taking out the voice over takes you out of Deckard's mind, so you don't understand his motivation.

IMHO, the director's cut is a lousy movie, and the original is one of the greatest films ever made. The DC uses the same gimmic of the replicant believing they are human twice, so it weakens the power, and turns the whole thing into a shaggy dog story, or close to one. Take away Deckard's being a human, and the entire higher element of the film--the battle of humans with bigotry, what humans recognize as human or as sentient, the nature of our own uniqueness, etc--disappears, and you have a long "How do we really know anything?" story with no deeper point and a pretentious ending meant to make highschoolers feel complex.

[Lethe]

41. well

Deckard and the viewer don't actually realize he was a replicant until the final scene.

I don't understand what you mean by a gimmic. Roy and company already know they are replicants. Then Rachel figures it out, then Deckard. It's not twice, it's a succession.

I think Deckard being a replicant makes the film more poignant. We follow him as a sympathetic character, a human we can identify with because he just wants to do his job and eat some chinese food. When we learn he is a replicant, it turns our expectations on their head, because he is the most humanizing influence in the whole movie. It creates even more sympathy for the replicants, because we realize that they are identical to the one person who we sympathized with in the first place.

[jobycom]

42. Roy et al knew they were replicants.

Rachel didn't know, which was why her revelation was so powerful. Having Deckard become one just uses the same device again. And it weakens it the moral questions, for me, to have Deckard revealed as a replicant at the end of the film. Rather than putting the viewer in a replicant's head, seeing the replicants differently (something they had already achieved with Rachel), it takes the viewer out of Deckard's.

The original scene works best for me. The whole point was to transform the replicants for the viewer, from dangerous creations to human beings, while generating questions about what really constitutes life, or being human. You move from the basic survival instincts of the older style replicants whose thoughts seem human, to Rachel, who has all the human qualities because she believes she is human, to Deckard--the replicant killing human--falling in love with her, bonding with the most human of emotions. The final straw is the revelation that Rachel not only functions completely as a human, but even has an unknown life span. At that point the whole question is "What is the difference?" which creates all the feelings of the injustice of the humans and their refusal to accept replicants, which becomes the timeless question about why bigotry exists, and why people can't recognize it. So you've got all the great philosophical questions rolled into one film--why are we here, why do we exist, how do we know anything about our existince, what is love, what is humanity, how do you judge right from wrong...?

Make Deckard a replicant and take away Rachel's longevity, and you've got a cute movie about replicants shooting each other up, falling in love, and escaping. It's Michael Bay doing Hamlet, with Hamlet living at the end.

[Lethe]

44. but they know they are going to die

and soon, we expect, because the others had 4 year lifespans.

The irony is that a replicant is bigoted and doesn't even know he is a replicant. It causes us to look into ourselves and question the Us vs Them mentality.

Deckard being a replicant doesn't lessen the impact of any of your points, IMO, it strengthens them.

[Hawaii Hiker]

43. Ok, now I'm more confused

I thought Rachel KNEW she was a replicant, the thing with her was that it took over 100 questions for Deckard to figure it out....Remember the scene where Tyrell says to Deckard "How many questions does it usually take"?...I mean, Leon it took 1-2 questions....Rachel was a much more complex case...

Now, I'm waiting for someone to say Tyrell was a replicant to....

[myrna minx]

53. No, she didn't know she was a replicant. She was horrified to discover that her memories were

implanted. Here's the scene.

http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=8BYSYE1zXUw

[tigereye]

50. well, for me the point of the film was - what is humanity and what does it

really mean to be human? And this point can be expressed either way you interpret certain elements - replicant or no. Personally, I liked the original version ( I seem to be in the minority, though), although I don't mind the final cut- it gives a somewhat different feel, less expository and more open-ended, I think.

[IndianaJones]

17. humans can fail an empathy test, why couldn't replicants pass one? nt.

[Fire Walk With Me]

18. Search the archives.

[tigereye]

19. read Dick's short story, that might be a good way to look at it all

Also, after you watch the film many times, you start to see little clues that might fit with that perspective.

If it's any consolation, I never thought about that after seeing the film the first 10 or so times, until my husband said something to me about it...

[MrScorpio]

24. I have no idea why Scott would suggest such a thing

Unless he's trying to get people's dander up

[jobycom]

33. Probably helps him get laid at sci-fi conventions.

You know, makes him seem deep to teenagers. Over the legal age, we assume.

[Symarip]

40. From my understanding

It's only a suggestion.

[XemaSab]

47. It's not just the unicorn dream

it's the song he's playing at the piano too.

[DerekG]

49. Deckard MUST be human

The whole point of the bloody story is that this hollow shell of a man, who murders for a living, manages to regain his humanity by bearing witness to the suffering of those who aren't themselves human.

I don't care what Scott says. If Deckard's a human, then Blade Runner does not resonate.

[dysfunctional press]

51. rachel wasn't an escapee from the off-world colony.

in 'the final cut' there's a brief scene where deckard's eyes have the same 'glow' as the replicants did.