Before I pick my fight with the BR lovers I should say that I liked it a lot. It’s very thoughtful and thought-provoking. It’s just that MR is superior.

The biggest advantage that MR has is the narrative. MR is a more engaging and more complex story and it is a much better-told story. It’s perfectly fluid, perfectly paced, and perfectly put together. BR suffers, I think, because it can’t decide on a protagonist. I understand that you’re supposed to sympathize with both Deckard (the Harrison Ford character) and Roy Batty (the Rutger Hauer character) so that you’re conflicted during the climactic confrontation between the two and I think the film accomplishes this. But the dual protagonist thing, at least the way it was done here, makes for a clunky narrative. There is too much time in which the title character is not onscreen. Not only that, a lot of the onscreen action is entirely inconsequential to Deckard. You don’t get the sense that Deckard is even actively pursuing the replicants for much of the time and what is shown of the pursuit is disjointed. The viewer doesn’t fully participate in the pursuit from either perspective. Additionally, Scott spends too much time showing us the Future itself, as opposed to the characters’ interaction with the Future, which detracts from our engagement with the characters’ plights. All of which makes for a viewing experience that is less engaging and less entertaining than the purely protagonist-driven narrative of MR.

Here’s my hack Monday morning filmmaker suggestion for a better way to handle the BR material: re-title it Replicants, make Roy Batty a stronger protagonist, and make Deckard a sympathetic (to the viewer) antagonist along the lines of the Tommy Lee Jones character in The Fugitive. I think this could’ve been done without losing the philosophical elements of the material and it could make for a film that’s more enjoyable to watch.

SPOILER ALERT!

I agree somewhat with the MR detractors that think the resolution of the story is too emotionally tidy. It didn’t bother me as much as it bothered others, though–for the most part the characters acted as one would expect them to. Which brings me to my problem with the ending of BR. I’m trying to understand why Deckard decided to run away rather than finish Batty off with the gun, why he didn’t pick the gun back up when he dropped it, and especially why Batty saved Deckard’s life. I’m trying to come up with an answer other than, “Because the movie needs to end with Deckard alive listening to Batty’s dying man monologue,” but a lot of the final sequence felt a bit contrived. Does anybody have a more satisfying answer?

Matrix and Dark City cover much of the same ground– Dark City as Sci-fi Noir, Matrix as sci-fi action.

more on Dark City:

http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Dark_city

This is a good match-up, Elisabeth. I’ll have to rent BR again; I remember renting it because of its mythical status and not enjoying it. I remember that half the time it was so dark I couldn’t see what was going on.

MR was slick-looking, but not all that deep.