30 Day Movie Challenge: Day 21

            I decided to do the 30 day movie challenge as a blog series as it ties into my blog activities rather easily and I am once again not blogging my usual series with regularity in spite of saying that I would.

            Today is "A Movie that that I watch when I am Angry".  I movie that I watch when I get angry?  Okay, is this a thing with people?  Like you watch a movie because your boss has been up your ass all day and that makes you feel better?  Cause I don't do that, like... ever.  When that happens I write, as evidenced by some other blog entries... but I don't just forget about things underneath a fog of narrative and visuals, I exorcise those negative things from my mind and put them in writing to be held against me in a court of law after the spree killing has been brought to an end.  So how about I take this time to write about a movie that makes me mad for content, and I have already stated that I would get around to it.  What movie is it?  What could it be?  I already talked about "Harry Potter and the Deathly Hollows Part 1" in great detail so what movie do other people like that I dislike enough to get sort of buggered about?  Well, actually there are lots of movies that fit that description, but this time it is "Blade Runner".

Also, pretty boring.

             Created during a sort of early 80's renaissance of science fiction and staring the most prominent and well liked star of science fiction, Harrison Ford, "Blade Runner" is the story of a specialized bounty hunter that tracks replicants, androids that look like humans and can only be detected with a complex psychological test.  These androids are otherwise indistinguishable except for a lack of empathy, they are sociopaths.  The androids are on the whole vastly stronger and smarter than humans and have as their only real drawback a short life span of four years... Why?  Who the fuck knows.

A lot of this movie's problems would be solved if they just made the robots' have blue skin.

             The androids being pursued by Ford vary in function, one is a pleasure robot, made to look like a beautiful woman so as to serve as the sperm dumpster for people who live off world and that can't get a girlfriend.  There is also a big guy whose used for lifting things, and a war droid.  All of them suck design wise.

This is a pleasure bot?  I'm sure she looks good under all the garish crap.

            See, creating an organism as complex as a human is time and material intensive, it's why humans take so long to grow and cost so much to raise from children, we are complex, and we are also really inefficient.  The reason humans dominate (and this should come as no big shock) is because we are smart, imaginative, and capable of working together to build machines and specialized roles in society.  These robots are designed to be physically more powerful to serve functions, so here is my question: why is it the guy who is a piece of construction equipment doesn't look like a Constructicon from "Transformers"?  Why is he not an intelligent truck, or for that matter, not just a normal truck?  Why do we have such a complex and expensive machine for digging ditches?  And why does the guy who exists to be a battle droid look like a normal guy?  Why isn't he "RoboCop", if you are going to make a war machine why not go all out, and have targeting systems, bulletproof skin, and built in guns?  Why not make a T-800?  Answer me movie, you illogical junk.

This is your unstoppable killing machine?  Sure if he were running after me down an alley I would run, but he's still susceptible to bullets.

             And this also plays into the moral question of the movie, should you create machines that for all intents and purposes are people, when really this is akin to creating a slave race.  It is a moral question that mirrors the question of the divine, why would god create us to live in misery: fighting, toiling, and getting fucked, only allowing us to live long enough to die?  This is a fascinating question, and it is really only discussed for about 4 minutes before it is almost completely forgotten, and the battle droid waxes poetic about the whole thing toward the end, in a moment which resolves nothing.  And when I say it resolves nothing, I mean it resolves nothing.  There isn't any ambiguity to this, the movie just peters out without any answer or real discussion.

Also, Edward James Olmos is in it.  And does nothing but be creepy.

             "But what about the scenery and look of the movie?" you ask.  It is the same dingy, half abandoned, constantly raining industrial dystopia that has been repeated constantly since H.G. Wells started trotting it out in the late 1800's.  There is also a shit ton of random animals (who I think are also just robots that look like animals) everywhere, and are never explained, and really everything just looks miserable.  Now I get why this would be cool in the early 80's, nothing like this had ever been on film (except for "Metropolis", and possibly the unseen ground level of "The Jetsons" Earth), so there is a lot of scenery masturbation looking at the too big to exist buildings of the far distant future of... 2019?  This is a stretch even by Al Gore's panic mongering standards.

At least "The Fifth Element" was a little chipper about their flying cars.

             "What about Ford?  Surely he is awesome!"  Actually, no.  Ford's character is depressed, for no adequately explained reason and drunk, for the adequately shown reason of: he is constantly drinking.  He is also socially retarded, and at one point enters into a sexual relationship with an experimental replicant, which comes off as the most loveless and awkward interaction on film... prior to Padme and Anakin of course.  He invites her to come down to a local bar and drink with him, while looking for the escaped killer androids, so he's also lazy and irresponsible.  He also sucks at fighting, frequently going up against these killer robots with no back up and a gun he can't aim worth shit, he gets his ass beat constantly; and he only manages to kill two of the replicants, one of which he shoots in the back while chasing it through a crowd... so he is also a reckless danger to the public, and kind of cold blooded.  His character sucks.

Relax, your safe so long as you are what he is aiming at.

             And lastly my most petty of complaints.  The title of this movie is ridiculous.  "Blade Runner" is what they call the bounty hunters who go after the replicants.  Why are they called that?  Fuck if I know.

This is also a Blade Runner, being a smug dick.

            So, yeah, sci-fi classic that blows ass.  There was better fiction that tackled this topic, and other ideas with much better action and periphery science fiction effects, it was called "Ghost in the Shell", go watch it instead.

The time table in this is also a little optimistic.  But the music is so Awesome!