Blade Runner: The Final Cut + Vangelis Disco at The Talleyrand
Tom Grieve, Cinema Editor
“I’ve seen things you people wouldn’t believe, attack ships on fire off the shoulder of Orion. I watched C-beams glitter in the dark near the Tannhäuser Gate. All those moments will be lost in time, like tears in rain.”
With the death of Rutger Hauer earlier this year, cinema lost one of its icons. The Talleyrand pays tribute to the Dutch actor, writer and environmentalist with a screening of his most famous film: Blade Runner. Hauer played Roy Batty, the blonde, blue-eyed hulking antagonist to Harrison Ford’s futuristic neo-noir anti-hero. Hauer rewrote much of his famous speech in Ridley Scott’s sci-fi classic, stripping out what he felt were overly operatic flourishes, reworking it to fit his character — a bioengineered combat model replicant created with four-year lifespan, to prevent him from developing empathy.
Directed by Scott in 1982, the events of the science fiction classic are set in November 2019. But the world envisioned is a far cry from that in which we find ourselves. A techno-dystopia in neon and rain, Blade Runner’s aesthetic fused L.A. film noir with East Asian metropolises and emerging cyberpunk, and in doing so helped define the visual language of much of contemporary science fiction. While the plot borrowed heavily from Philip K. Dick’s Do Androids Dream of Electric Sheep, thrusting dense philosophical speculation and pulp genre thrills into a the thick atmosphere of an imagined Los Angeles, soundtracked by Vangelis’ cool, synth score.
The film is of course a firm cult favourite and critical darling that sets pulses racing to this day. The Talleyrand’s free screening will be from The Final Cut – it’s the most complete and most stylish, they reckon. It doesn’t stop there though. In an effort to extend your time in Ridley Scott’s version of November 2019, the Levenshulme venue follow the film with a “Vangelis-inspired neo-noir synth vinyl shakedown.”
“The light that burns twice as bright burns half as long, and you have burned so very very brightly Roy.”
