Released on June 25, 1982, and directed by Ridley Scott for Warner Bros., Blade Runner is an American neo-noir science fiction film starring Harrison Ford, Rutger Hauer, Sean Young, and Daryl Hannah. Adapted from Philip K. Dick’s 1968 novel Do Androids Dream of Electric Sheep?, the film is set in a dystopian Los Angeles in November 2019, depicting a city of perpetual rain, overcrowded streets, and towering corporate architecture against which a declining human population coexists uneasily with Replicants — bioengineered synthetic humans manufactured by the Tyrell Corporation for off-world labor and combat. Ford plays Rick Deckard, a retired Blade Runner — a specialist police operative tasked with hunting and terminating rogue Replicants — who is reluctantly reinstated to track down four fugitives who have returned to Earth seeking to extend their artificially limited lifespans. The film was a commercial disappointment on its original release, failing to recoup its production budget at the domestic box office and receiving a divided critical response that struggled to locate it generically between the action film its marketing promised and the meditative philosophical inquiry Ridley Scott had actually made. Its subsequent reputation represents one of the most complete critical reversals in cinema history: through repertory screenings, home video, and the release of multiple director’s cuts — most definitively the 2007 Final Cut — Blade Runner came to be regarded as one of the greatest science fiction films ever produced, and its visual language, constructed by Scott and cinematographer Jordan Cronenweth, became perhaps the single most imitated aesthetic in the genre’s subsequent four decades.
Behind the Scenes. The production was famously acrimonious. The relationship between Ridley Scott and Harrison Ford deteriorated significantly during filming, with Ford reportedly contemptuous of Scott’s perfectionism and his prioritization of visual composition over performance, and Scott allegedly dismissive of Ford’s instincts about the character. Ford’s voiceover narration, imposed on the theatrical cut by the studio over Scott’s objection, was delivered by Ford with deliberate flatness in the hope that it would be rejected — a gambit that failed, the narration appearing in the release print regardless. The question of whether Deckard is himself a Replicant — left deliberately ambiguous in the Final Cut through the inclusion of a unicorn dream sequence that rhymes with an origami figure left by the ambiguous Gaff — became one of the most debated interpretive questions in popular cinema, with Scott consistently affirming the Replicant reading and Ford consistently rejecting it. Rutger Hauer’s delivery of the “Tears in Rain” monologue in the film’s climactic rooftop scene, partly rewritten by Hauer himself on the night of filming, is among the most celebrated pieces of screen acting of the decade. The film’s production designer Lawrence G. Paull and visual futurist Syd Mead built a vision of urban decay and corporate gigantism that drew on film noir, Japanese commercial signage, and industrial brutalism in proportions that had never been attempted at this scale before.
The Watch. The watch worn by Harrison Ford as Rick Deckard in Blade Runner is a Microma LCD digital watch, a product of one of the more consequential and melancholy episodes in American industrial history. Microma was a wholly owned subsidiary of Intel Corporation — the semiconductor giant — established in 1972 to capitalize on Intel’s proprietary expertise in integrated circuit miniaturization by applying it to the emerging market for solid-state digital watches. The logic was impeccable on paper: Intel possessed the most advanced microchip fabrication capability in the world, and the quartz digital watch represented exactly the kind of high-precision, low-power consumer electronics application for which that capability seemed ideally suited. Microma produced a range of LCD and LED digital watches through the mid-1970s, housed in cases that reflected the design vocabulary of their moment — angular, flat, and resolutely modernist, wearing their technological identity on their faces with the unabashed pride of an industry that believed the future belonged entirely to it. The brand was abandoned by Intel in 1978 after the American watch industry was comprehensively outmaneuvered by Japanese and Hong Kong manufacturers who could produce comparable digital movements at a fraction of the cost, and the episode prompted Intel’s then-chairman Gordon Moore to observe, in a remark that became famous within the industry, that the experience had taught him the difference between a company that makes something people wear and a company that makes something people use. The specific Microma model on Ford’s wrist in Blade Runner is a late-production LCD piece in a brushed rectangular case, its digital display and rectilinear geometry rhyming precisely with the film’s vision of a future in which technology is simultaneously omnipresent and already decaying — glamorous infrastructure turning to rust at the edges. Whether the choice was Scott’s or a wardrobe department decision, the placement is almost too apt to be accidental: a watch made by a semiconductor company that tried and failed to colonize an adjacent industry, worn in a film about synthetic beings trying and failing to transcend the boundaries of their manufacture. Microma pieces were never scarce — Intel produced them in considerable volume — but the combination of their relative fragility, the vulnerability of early LCD technology to degradation, and the general indifference of collectors until screen-identification culture brought them to wider attention means that examples in fully functional condition with intact displays are considerably harder to locate than their original production numbers might suggest.
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€800
Movie Year:
1982
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