Blade Runner has been described as a movie where everything comes together. This might seem like an odd description for such a rambunction mess of a film, which was marred by so much studio interference and difficulties in editing that director Ridley Scott felt that the director's cut of the movie left something to be desired, but what's meant is that it was a movie that in many ways was the career peak for everyone involved. Scott, a talented visionary but also an undisciplined egomaniac, never again made a film where he was so fully in command of his powers. Screenwriter Hampton Fancher went on to do some interesting work, but nothing on this level. Harrison Ford became a superstar, but one often defined by mediocrity and flatness; Sean Young's career would be sunk by rumors of her unpredictable emotional state; and Rutger Hauer would sabotage his own acting talents by appearing in anything that came with a paycheck -- but all three turned in fantastic performances. Even the movie's rich population of character actors, all of whom did great work elsewhere, seemed to hit their peak in Blade Runner -- including Edward James Olmos, M. Emmett Walsh, William Sanderson, Brion James, and Joe Terkel. Even Daryl Hannah isn't an embarrassment. The cinematography is among Jordan Cronenweth's best; the set direction, costumes, and production design are all top-notch; and it would be far and away the best movie adapted from a Philip K. Dick novel -- not that the author would live to see any of the rotten ones to come.
Even the composer of the film's score did what many consider to be his best work in Blade Runner. Vangelis (born Evangelos Papathanassiou) had built a career around his light New Age compositions that, if they weren't exactly triumphant, were at least slightly less boring than the music of most of his peers, but he scored a major success in 1981 with his stirring soundtrack work for Chariots of Fire. On the strength of that album, director Ridley Scott personally selected him to write the score to Blade Runner, instructing him to capture the film's mixture of depressing urban dystopia and shimmering, artificial advertised reality. Vangelis himself claimed he was attracted to the tortured character of ex-cop/blade runner Rick Deckard, and some of the thematic movements reflect this, shying away from the composer's usual use of high-toned, open chords to indicate triumph and transcendance, replaced with contracted, moody, jazzy movements and a sense of melancholy and despair. Much like the movie, the album fools you: the key notes, fills and musical cues are all a bit off, a bit subverted and turned around, leaving you uncertain how to feel, just as the script intends with characters like Deckard and Roy Batty. Vangelis would go on to have a rich and rewarding career as a film composer, but he'd never do anything this good again. Unfortunately, legal disputes with the record company -- as well as objections from the composer himself -- kept an 'official' soundtrack from being released for many years; the most widely available one featured the score being played by a thrown-together and inferior group of studio musicians. The multi-disc set released decades later at least features the original music, but it's lacking a number of cues, bits of incidental music, and one of the best compositions on the record; let's hope that a "final cut" of the film music is imminent, just as we now have the definitive version of the film.
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