EARLY ACCESS: Blade Runner

Ashleigh. This movie is a "thinker". There's some action, but it's really a way to talk about what it is to be human. Lots of symbolism here. The most obvious is when Rutger Hauer is on the roof. As a church girl, I'm sure you noticed the nail through the hand, and the release of the peace dove as references to Jesus and the Crucifixion. It's always a good way to start an argument if you say, "Deckerd was a Replicant". I first saw this in theaters (yes, I'm that old). And that version had this really lame ending, where Deckerd and the girl are in a flying car zooming over pristine forests in a clear sky. It was jarring, since we'd just spent hours in a dark, polluted, dirty world. If there was clean air and trees around, why weren't more people there? The director was forced to put that in to give the movie a "happy ending". It was yanked in the director's cut. I would recommend you watch it again; I think you'll pick up some of the hints they drop at the beginning and it'll start to come together.

Oh, I keep asking that same question: what are we looking at? Especially since the screen keeps turning all-black. Which I think I understand; copyright detection. But. How about a freeze-frame or a couple blips from a single frame? So we can at least know *what* Ashleigh is reacting to?

It looks like there is one of the editing visual tracks that was turned off so there are many black screens where the scenes should be seen. It's when Ashleigh is in the small circle parts. May need to re-render it with that track turned back on. :)

Not sure if you realized Ashley, but there are a bunch of blank black screens in this reaction instead of scenes from the movie 😭

There’s a lot of unspoken things going on in Blade Runner that can make the movie a little impenetrable. Like, they don’t clearly explain that most animals are extinct, and that having an animal is seen as a sign of social status because they are so expensive. People buy artificial animals in the movie for the same reason someone might buy a fake Gucci purse. I don’t know if this would really change your experience of the movie, but what it’s really about is the question of identity and what makes someone human. The test Harrison Ford gives Rachel is supposed to test empathy, with the idea that empathy separates humans from replicants. Yet at the end, Roy shows empathy for Harrison Ford by sparing his life, even though Ford killed all of his friends, and throughout the movie, the humans rarely show empathy themselves. So who’s more human if the replicants show empathy and the humans don’t? The unicorn dream: when the cop leaves the unicorn origami, it signifies that he knows Harrison Ford is dreaming about them. Yet how could he know that? This is a clue that Ford is like Rachel: a replicant who doesn’t know he’s a replicant, which explains why the cops treat him as if he has no choice but to work for them again. They “own” him. Also, Harrison Ford keeps tons of old pictures, just like the replicant Leon did. A lot of this isn’t immediately obvious, so the movie is kind of divisive. People either love it or hate it. Personally, I love it, but then I’ve been watching and rewatching it for 45 years now, so I’ve had a lot of time to think about what it’s trying to say to viewers. Ridley Scott can be a little pretentious, but he sure makes visually beautiful films. PS: nice catch comparing the visuals to the Fifth Element. Both movies owe their style to the same French comic book artist, Jean Giraud )better known by his pseudonym Moebius). He was the production designer for the Fifth Element.

The replicant pupil is actually a practical effect achieved by placing a light source directly in line with the camera lens to catch the reflection from the persons retina. Kind of like the red-eye effect you sometimes get in pictures when you use a flash

Ah, the snake question: Why keep snakes? They're beautiful and fascinating, they're quiet, they don't shed hair, they don't often trigger allergies and they only smell when they poop (which is not often). You can keep them in small apartments, they're very low maintenance for a pet, cheap to feed compared to a lot of other pets, and the amount of space they need is manageable. And you can make their enclosures into some absolutely stunning habitats.

As far as I know, the Jack Ryan films won. This one's a hard pass

The movie you were thinking of was clearly Sling Blade. Not similar.

The movie you’re thinking about is “Sling Blade” with Billy Bob Thornton.

If you do another actor poll, make sure to have it a actor/actress poll because some people might get confused and think that actor poll is just for male suggestions!

You could maybe do a actor/actress poll for Franchise Fridays every other month.