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Comment by jmyeet | Hacker News Reader

I am one of the 11 people on Earth that hates coffee. "Hate" isn't strong enough. Even "despises" I'm not sure goes far enough. It tastes disgusting to me. I can't even stand the smell. This has led me at times to wonder if I'm crazy or if everyone else is. I do notice a ton of people consume a ton of sugar in their coffee so it seems like many don't really like coffee. They like sugar. But I digresss.

I have the same "am I crazy?" thoughts with Blade Runner. Unlike coffee it's not bad (subjectively). I just don't get the hype.

It's a product of its time too. I'd put it in the 80s Cyberpunk bucket where the noir surroundings and mega corporations are a product of xenophobia, basically. There were genuine fears the Japanese were "taking over". And Blade Runner reflects this zeitgeist. In Blade Runner it's the Tyrell Corporation. In Aliens it was the Weyland-Yutani Corporation.

Rutger Hauer did give a good performance and there were some good lines [1] but I'd never put it in my list of top films. Not even my list of top sci-fi films. It is better than Interstellar though, which is trash, so there's that.

[1]: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=wRxHYHPzs7s

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I first saw BR in a theater the month it originally came out. It's hard to appreciate from today's perspective just how revolutionary it was. The film itself, especially the original cut, is flawed due to the studio making last minute edits which the director, cast and writers were against. Yet, it is still the one science fiction film that has been more visually influential than any other. It changed everything that came after it.

> I'd put it in the 80s Cyberpunk bucket

BR largely created that bucket.

> BR largely created that bucket.

Combined with William Gibson’s Neuromancer. It was a combined effort.

And Neuromancer! although the movie is 1982 and the book is 1984 - I put these two together as the founding fathers of cyberpunk entertainment, albeit the FATHER of Cyberpunk is PK Dick...

BR created the visual dystopian cyberpunk world of the future without focusing on internet/online things...

Neuromancer changed and set the tone for the internet to come.

The thing is, that at 47, MANY MANY MANY of my contemporaries and peer grew up in the 80s with these concepts for which they said "wouldn't it be cool if...." <--- and then we went about building all this shit.

Its the nerds of the 80s that have all worked to make the cyberpunk-esque current systems we have, and the evil corps as described in both have come to pass.

It is a curious thing that science fiction and science-that-comes-to-pass influence each other.

This is why I like the idea of solarpunk. And yet, cyberpunk brings conflict/struggle which makes it interesting.

Solarpunk so far seems like a boring utopian dream. While I'd rather that in my future, it won't sell or interest people.

I think it's a telling condemnation of our society that a utopian dream for everyone is considered "boring", and impossible to motivate people around.

The article mentions the earlier influence of Alien to this genre, at least in the sense of this future dystopia. But even if we accept the premise that BR was groundbreaking, groundbreaking != good.

Larry Niven, for example, was a pioneering sci-fi author over many books but most of these books aren't great. Ringworld, for example, was one of the earlier works to talk about megastructures and the efficiency of living area per unit mass. The structure itself doesn't make sense (ie it would be torn apart by centrifugal force) but it's an important idea.

Neuromancer gets mentioned a lot in this particular genre. It too was groundbreaking but it's actually not that great of a book. Still, the groundbreaking aspect feeds into nostalgia, particularly if you read it when it came out. I feel like a lot of the BR hype falls into this same bucket. That's really all I'm saying.

The BR that I watched was more that an atmospheric sci-fi flic. It was an epic parable of the human condition. In the beginning it juxtaposes humans and replicants, but what you're supposed to realise along the way is that the life of a replicant is just an accelerated version of a human life: However long or short a lease on life you have been given, the common factor is that it is limited, and what matters is not what species you are, but how you approach life. Deckard, who is a coward unable to live the life that he has, has a life lesson to learn from the replicant who "does not go gently into that good night".

Of course, if Deckard is a replicant, then that interpretation goes out the window, and BR is just another forgettable sci-fi plot twist movie. And since Ridley Scott seems to think so, the movie is now ruined for me -- I have never watched the sequel, because it is just too painful to watch the original movie that I loved be destroyed.

I saw a movie that wasn't just a new visual style for 80's cyberpunk, it was so much more.

In the sequel, Deckard is human. I feel it reinforces your take on the first.

I'm glad to hear it. I may watch the sequel now. Maybe the rumors I heard was an intentional mislead.

Might be a case of Deus Ex Syndrome, where a hardcore fanbase preemptively smears all sequels because they're not the original.

The reply saying Deckard is human in the sequel is wrong. In the sequel Deckard says he does not know if he is human and does not care. That is the only time the topic comes up.

I also saw Blade Runner in its original theatrical release, and it's still the version I prefer. In this case I think the studio heads did Scott a backhand favor by ending the film as they did.

Spoilers:

If, as depicted in the original release, Deckard is human and Rachael is a replicant, then the movie is a true love story. The message of a true love story is that the Other is as deserving of love and dignity as I am. It's the message of Romeo and Juliet, Frankenstein and To Kill a Mockingbird, to name three offhand.

Whether your allotted lifespan is four years or threescore and ten, if you understand that you don't know how much time you really have, then you are entitled to the full measure of decent regard and respect the melancholy of that understanding earns. Batty bought that respect for Deckard and Rachael's sake. Thus the original ending is moving, and completes the film's overall themes.

If Deckard is also a replicant, as subsequent versions try to establish more and more explicitly, then of course he's going to want to be with Rachael. It's a no-brainer, it's no sacrifice, and there's no moral revolution of the characters. In which case I don't really know what the movie is supposed to be about. Boy robot meets girl robot, boy robot loses girl robot, boy robot gets girl robot? Boring. Definitionally cliché.

I suppose the realization of it is supposed to be some kind of shocking twist, but to me it simply empties the film of meaning.

I also don't like late-hour attempts to suggest that Deckard is a replicant. It cheapens Batty's finest act of forgiving him and sparing the life of his enemy who was trying to kill him.

even if Deckard is, I don't think that Roy would necessarily know - there's no indication that they can recognise their own (and if they could, that should be the basis of any test, rather than the psychological test they have to use).

We know he's a replicant, but I don't think he knows with any confidence: all he knows is that Gaff has an uncanny degree of insight, and that a definite replicant thought he was a man and spared his life to share the end of his own life with him. So he faces even more puzzles than them: if he isn't human then he had less free will than the other replicants since then he was created to unquestioningly retire them. Is he now going to enjoy that freedom and flee with Rachel, since he "owes her one", does he even know what his plan is as the lift doors shut?

I think i heavily disagree given the entire point of the movie is "what is life anyways". Roy choosing to spare deckard isn't becaus of some programming, he's real. He's a person. And like wise so is deckard and rachel, even if they are/aren't human.

It's a really fascinating look at tech that's gone so far we really don't know how to identify the difference, or it's more than possible at that point there isn't one. The sentient AI isn't some super machine that's going to build the singularity. It's "artificial" people forced into short lived slavery in a world that couldn't begin to give a damn about it.

So relieved I'm not alone in this. BR was top of my to-watch list after years of recommendations from friends, family, and the culture at large. And I finally sat down to watch it and it was downright bizarre. I read the book it's based on a few months prior and maybe that skewed my expectations. It was nothing at all like Dick's original story. The stakes were never explained and the visual language was incredibly gaudy and overemphasized.

Then again, I do think this is a case of the "if you'd only seen it at the time!" I saw 2001 A Space Odyssey recently for the first time, and while I really appreciated the practical effects, compared to fast paced, exciting movies made in the past 20-30 years it was boring and utterly baffling. Time passes, things change, the fact is not everything is for everyone, and assertions of "Thing X is the greatest of all time" are and always will be nonsense.

> Then again, I do think this is a case of the "if you'd only seen it at the time!"

I'm not sure about that. It definitely would have been more interesting if I saw it when it was novel, but the biggest fans of it always say I'll love it if I just watch cuts that came out a lot later.

I disagree.

Blade Runner seems to age like wine, and becomes more poignant with each re-watch.

It has a good pace, amazing visuals, asks tough questions, has some really good action sequences, etc.

Of course, everyone is looking for different things in movies and the experience is highly subjective.

Blade Runner will always be one of my favorites - right there with Contact, They Live, Jurassic Park, and other top-notch SciFi films.

Starship Troopers, don't forget Starship Troopers.

Starship troopers was a masterpiece. Don't mock it.

It mocks itself more than enough. It needs no help from me.

Mocking itself was its whole point.

It _appears_ to mock itself, so it wouldn't be blamed for fascist's propaganda while being essentially a recrutement tool for US military.

Maybe you don't know very much about Paul Verhoeven.

What are you trying to say? I saw his films. Why should I know anything about a director to make a judgement on the film I watched. It looks like you are trying to pool one fallacy or another failing to address the points in my comment directly (it says in their favor).

Paul Verhoeven does not and would never intend for his film to recruit for the US military.

Then why are you mocking it if it needs no help?

I wasn’t! I promise you I was 100% serious, it’s one of my fav sci-fi movies… somewhere a few steps down the list from blade runner

> It has a good pace, amazing visuals, asks tough questions, has some really good action sequences, etc.

If I may add: the score produced by Vangelis.

The xenophobia angle is really interesting to me. Despite being born after the movies release I always loved it. But I am also a huge japanophile and am unusual in the regard that I badly want cities as they are in Blade Runner and other Cyberpunk fantasies and was thus blind to the xenophobia, since I see the intended negative as desirable.

I also echo this pov, it never had occurred to me about the xenophobia angle

I agree, maybe some author had this xenophobic side, but not all of them, and Gibson, which is made, arguably, the first Cyberpunk book, introduced the "japanese" tropes, and he did out of admiration.

> I just don't get the hype.

IMO, much depends on when you were born.

When it came out, Blade Runner was truly something else and rode in on multiple deep cultural vibes of that era (e.g. Japan, Vangelis's synth music, etc...).

Second, the book it was based on (https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Do_Androids_Dream_of_Electric_...) was also quite unique in the SF genre of that era, as was the author (Phil K Dick).

The thing is : on top of that, amazingly enough, the visuals / art direction has aged rather well, going from what was a futuristic vibe at the time to something that now looks steampunk-ish.

I must confess to being boringly average when it comes the Blade Runner: I do love the movie, and it is certainly in my top ten sci-fi movies list.

FWIW, Blade Runner (like some other films e.g. Apocalypse Now) weren't considered as anything special at the time but were more appreciated as the years went on with or without director's cuts.

That said, I really liked both at the time.

I watched apocalypse now soon after it's release and was completely blown away by it. There is a soundtrack album to which I listen occasionally.

There were definitely other Vietnam War and related films like Platoon and Coming Home which were probably more highly regarded at the time but haven't had the staying power of Apocalypse Now.

I recall apocalypse now being extremely popular at the time of its release. Maybe that was just my social circle?

It was moderately successful at the box office ($100m worldwide) after a very troubled production but it only won sound and cinematography Oscars. Whereas Platoon for example won Picture, Director, Editing, and Sound. Coming Home won Best Actor and Actress.

Apocalypse Now wasn't a flop and had a reasonably good critical reception at the time (although Brando's performance was criticized) but overall it was seen as pretty middle of the road among Vietnam War and Vietnam War-adjacent (e.g. Born on the Fourth of July) films. Being seen as a great film by many mostly came after its initial release.

Tyrell is of Scandinavian origin, Eldon Tyrell was played by Joe Turkel, the name in Do Androids Dream Of Electric Sheep was the Rosen corporation. I figure it was more fear of Germanic people than Japanese.

The Philip K. Dick book dates from the 60s so it doesn't really fit into the 80s Japanese xenophobia zeitgeist.

yes, nor does the movie. Eldon Tyrell is not Japanese, Tyrell is not a Japanese or even an Asiatic sounding name, Rachel is not Japanese.

Yutani is a Japanese name, Weyland-Yutani sounds like the merger of an Occidental and Oriental firm.

I was not supporting the Japanese xenophobia zeitgeist idea vis-a-vis the names, I was indicating that the name itself (in Blade Runner) did not support it and indicating that from the source material of the book it was not supported.

> I figure it was more fear of Germanic people than Japanese.

Probably a combination of both to represent the Axis, in the book even the Soviets are also still around and the Cold War actually went hot, which is what lead to thermonuclear WWIII that left Earth increasingly inhabitable.

Blade Runner was truly original.And it was truly copied all over the place.

The only reason I give people like you a pass on hating on Blade Runner is I, personally, can't stand The Matrix -- which has made me a pariah with my peer group for over 20 years now.

I liked Blade Runner, but one thing that bothered me was the lack of flat screen technology. All the screens are CRT, even the ones in the vehicles. You'd think the artists in the 80's would have easily imagined flat screens would exist in the near future. Chroma keying a flat square should have been a trivial effect.

Chroma keying was nontrivial at the time. Once you are processing the shot it is now an "effects shot" and you've got a budget to stick to.

Interestingly enough, the screens in the film 2001 were all flat - because they were rear projection screens, with film or slides projected onto them.

Okay, but I recall Superman used much harder blue-screen trickery, and was earlier than Blade Runner. They had to key out a man with flapping cape and wind in hair.

Even if not keyed, the rear projection would have worked too. Doesn't matter I guess. I didn't realise 2001 had flat screens! Good pickup.

> It's a product of its time too. I'd put it in the 80s Cyberpunk bucket where the noir surroundings and mega corporations are a product of xenophobia, basically.

This is a super interesting critique of basically everything cyberpunk, that I've only recently come across. I still don't totally buy the xenophobia angle, because to me it just came across as a projection of hyper-corporate/capitalist. Like it's an extrapolation out from where we were, but the problem isn't that it's foreigners, it's that it's hyper-capitalist. In blade runner the world has been globalized to the point where we don't recognize downtown LA, but that's not actually what's wrong with the world - big faceless corporations and environmental destruction are what's wrong with the world. While the environment itself is heavily influenced by asian imagery, Tyrell and Weyland-Yutani aren't very strongly coded asian. i.e. Tyrell is run by an Elon Musk type engineer-ceo, and Weyland is a decidedly white name to go along with the Yutani part.

I'm still digesting this idea tho, I definitely need to re-watch with this in mind. There is definitely some playing with xenophobia there, just... how much? and is it re-enforcing it, or is it challenging it?

To be clear, you shouldn't discount the movie because it's intertwined anti-Japense sentiment of the time. It's simply more context.

You cannot separate art from the time when it was created. It's why you see a lot of countercultural themes in 1960s movies, for example.

Listen, if I've managed to get this far without discounting the movie despite the blatant and jarring non-consensual sex scene presented as a love scene, I'm not about to let some mild xenophobia stop me.

Some of my favorite pieces of art are deeply flawed. What's important is understanding what ideas they contain, so you don't just uncritically and subconsciously believe those ideas. The xenophobia in cyberpunk idea is jarring to me because I wasn't really aware of it, and if it is there, it means I have some unexamined biases that hid it from me.

> non-consensual sex scene

In Blade Runner? I don't recall that... don't they kiss, and then it cuts to next scene. They still have their clothes on, standing by the door!

You can watch it if you’ve got the stomach for it

https://m.youtube.com/watch?v=IjO8wsjPqbg

It’s… unpleasant, at best.

But you’re right it’s not exactly a “sex” scene, since any sex is implied

She says "put your hands on me" at the end of the scene. Her words. He didn't tell her to say that.

They proceed to kiss each other, and consensual sex is then implied.

You’re telling me about yourself right now, not about the movie.

Do you also have moral dilemmas about the violent shootings, murder and other nasty things the fictional characters get up to? Or is it just the kiss that rattled you?

When a movie is presenting coercive behavior as good, yes it does bother me. Yes within the story his behavior is validated - it was what she needed blah blah blah. That’s fine. But how many people were assaulted by men thinking they were deckard? It’s not zero

> how many people were assaulted by men thinking they were deckard? It’s not zero

It's zero.

Why aren't you getting your moral radar in a spin about the numerous violent and aggressive scenes in this or any movie? The real world has a huge problem with violence and guns after all.

I presume you eat popcorn as people or replicants are shot and killed on screen, or when poetic, philosophical replicants crush the skulls of their maker humans.... but draw the line at a coercive kiss? That's when you put the popcorn down?

Fiction movies are not real-life benchmarks or instruction manuals for life. Characters are flawed, scenes shocking, stories twisted. Deckard is not Dr Richard Kimble. Deckard is a "killing machine" in a dark sci-fi movie. His pre-kiss tantrum was him as Mr Nice Guy relative to his other actions.

It’s not zero. Ask a woman. Done talking about it. Have a nice day.

> Weyland is a decidedly white name to go along with the Yutani part.

British Leyland was a car company which broke up shortly after Alien came out. The implication in the W-Y name is pretty clear: A Japanese company bought out Leyland.

Whilst freak examples of effective period Japanese Anglo Saxon industrial cooperation have been known, [0] surely British Leyland is stretching too far. In fact BL's board did claim to Thatcher that they were going to build a new small family car with Honda about this time, but management only wanted more money to avoid hassle with the shop stewards.

[0] https://www.thisamericanlife.org/561/nummi-2015

Edited for clarity and language.

I love Blade Runner, but I find the detective to be a useless entity, like an ant walking in a deeper world that makes him meaningless. And the idea of them not being able to discover which are the cyborgs makes no sense.

Aren't we all meaningless ants?

I mean we could replace Deckard with a pizza delivery guy, or even a camera drone, and the story won't change a lot. Try changing Neo in Matrix, Dave on Space Odyssey. And there's nothing wrong, the main character is the spectator, which makes it a more deeply philosophical movie, the replicant captcha is performed on the viewer. "What's meaningful" the movie asks.

You are right, and that's what's so brilliant about it. Deckard barely shows emotions nor connections to the world. At times it feels like his detective persona is just an act, just like his humanity could just be an act - no matter whether he is human or a knowing or not-knowing replicant.

Stalker gave me that exact same feeling of, as spectator, being tricked into being the protagonist.

A fairly ineffective detective protagonist teasing at the edges of something much bigger, and mostly getting steamrolled by it, is a common noir thing. Not universal, but a frequently-used trope.

I will join you in your coffee hate. Can't even stand it in pastries.

I have to ask then, what films do you like better than Interstellar?

I was also baffled by the "interstellar is trash" line. Maybe I watched it wrong.

I didn't love Interstellar the first time I saw it.

When I watched Inception for the first time I walked out of the theatre in love with that movie (and I still am), but, leaving Interstellar I felt confused and underwhelmed.

Perversely I think I was actually very overwhelmed by Interstellar because after seeing it many times in the almost a decade since it came out (oh my god how has it been 10 years) it's become one of my favorite films, but, there is just so much going on that it was difficult to connect with it on the first viewing.

I had a similar experience. It is one of my favorite scifi movies, and it gets better with every viewing. I think it also resonates especially because I have a young daughter myself. The soundtrack though, that clicked right away. I never get tired of that soundtrack. In fact, I would say it is my favorite soundtrack of any movie ever made.

Countless SF films. I found Interstellar very middle-drawer. I didn't hate it but certainly wasn't wowed by it.

It was a fine excuse to have a few big-budget sci-fi themed FX spectacles.

Could have stood to be a full hour shorter, though.

My view is a little more negative because of all the hype it gets but only a little. It's just a bad movie.

SPOILER WARNING

To understand the plot structure (such that it is) in Interstellar, you have to start with the writer's desire for the emotional ending of the main character with his daughter, who is now old. Everything that happens in the movie is a really forced way to reach that outcome.

The whole watch time-travel thing was more of that illogical nonsense in service of that conclusion.

The time dilation to make all this happens just doesn't work that way. You have to get to a significant percentage of c before time dilation becomes really noticeable. For example, at 0.9c you're still only at ~2x time dilation [1].

The gravity effects of the black hole don't make sense either.

The "science" of Interstellar is no more realistic than Star Trek or Starship Troopers.

[1]: https://www.fourmilab.ch/cship/timedial.html

I mean I agree, on the other hand if it's no more realistic perhaps this means that the fiction part of science fiction actually takes precedence despite coming second and thus is actually not any sort of evidence of its being a bad movie.

Odd. I didn’t like interstellar either, but time dilation in the vicinity of a supermassive black hole is way, way less controversial than being able to build a wormhole large enough for a ship to get through.

Possibly you’re confusing stellar mass black holes and super massive black holes?

Time dilation doesn’t only occur at high velocities, so your link focusing entirely on velocity is accurate, but I think not really relevant.

The physics was pretty reasonable for the time dilation. Possibly off by an order of magnitude or so, but not ridiculous on its face.

Except for the wormhole.

Risky Business

Arrival, BR2042, Dune Pt 1. I’m beginning to see a pattern here.

I'm with you. Arrival is an absolute classic. BR2042 needed some suspension of disbelief IMHO, but it was as good as you could hope for in a BR sequel. Dune pt. 1 ... it's one of the greatest sci-fi movies ever made.

you sound like those type of guys that try to be 'cool' by disliking what other people like.

Blade Runner is a great movie for its time and it has inspired a lot of artists. It is a Noir (Sci-fi), and the type of movie that only adults would appreciate, due to its storyline. If you are under 25, probably it is not a good movie for you.

Same with 2001: A Space Odyssey, which came much earlier. any other movies of the time.

Also Interstellar is very unique in one major aspect: They had to model true science (and maybe made a discovery) when they modeled the look of light around the super massive Black Hole. 5 years later, the real black hole halo pictures came out, and the movie got it spot on.

You might not like the story, but good movies like that try to predict the future. They often miss, but sometimes get it right. Blade Runner deals with AI, Androids, and the question of 'What is human'. We might face this issue if General AI becomes a thing 50 years down the road.

I can only recommend "The science of Interstellar" book as a great companion to the movie, explaining the physics side of it. As for Interstellar itself, I watched it the year it came out and I thought it was a pretty cool science-fiction movie. I rewatched it last year sometime after my father died of covid and I appreciated it from a whole different angle. Suffice to say, I don't remember the last time I cried watching a movie.

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