Just noticed this earlier. Off the top of my head Kurosawa's
Ran is the only one of my desert-island films from the '80s, so I'll go with that one. Then
My Life as a Dog by Hallstrom (I dare you to name a more exuberant, delectable movie about childhood).
And two honorable mentions I respect more than love:
Shoah by Claude Lanzmann, the greatest Holocaust film ever made along with Alain Resnais'
Night and Fog (at this point I'd probably add Laszlo Nemes'
Son of Saul), and Chris Marker's landmark essay film
Sans soleil. Both are among the rare films to have changed the language of cinema by blurring the lines between documentary and fiction while expanding the limits of each.
Also I might give a shout-out to
Blade Runner myself. But note to those of you who have yet to see Ridley Scott's masterpiece or saw it in its various incarnations (Wiki lists up to a whopping
eight versions!) before the new millennium: you owe it to yourself to watch the 2007 "final cut" which is the only version that puts all the missing pieces together. Scott considered the unicorn dream sequence more important than any other in the film, and rightly so: it is unclear even in the earlier versions that Harrison Ford's Deckard might himself be a replicant, one of the androids with a tragically short lifespan of four years, but he is tasked (in fact all but blackmailed) to "retire" (read: kill) initially four but ultimately five of them, the last one of whom happens to be his lover. The '07 final cut is the only version that includes this sequence, which enhances the tragic and possibly ironic overtones of the movie.
It is also this crucial detail which enhances the film's diluted humanism. As in the greatest sci-fi classics - Kubrick's
2001, Tarkovsky's
Solaris and Spielberg/Kubrick's
A.I. (I'd place
Blade Runner a slight notch below this formidable trio - keep reading) - it is the robots themselves who turn out to be the most human characters of the story, but
Blade Runner pushes this axiom to the extreme in that its replicants are the
only ones we care about. (Hence my slight downgrading of Scott's magnum opus. Also curiously enough I'd say
A.I. boasts the richest assortment of human and non-human characters of these sci-fi landmarks, though it may well be the most misanthropic and nihilistic of the foursome.) But then Deckard's ambiguous humanity makes you constantly question which side he or you should be on, or whether that is even a valid question to begin with, which belies Pauline Kael's not-entirely-unwarranted observation that despite its visionary visuals the film drenches you with "post-human feeling."
I was lucky enough to have seen only the 1992 "director's cut" (which really didn't have much input from Scott himself, yet another reason to be wary of the marketing shibboleth) before the final cut, which spared me Deckard/Ford's jarring voice-over and the equally out-of-place happy ending, but even that version fell short of Scott's overall vision and held me back from enthusiastically endorsing it. And frankly even now I can't say I have completely warmed up to it, and I do wonder if I might have felt the same way with a different first impression. If you have yet to introduce yourself to this greatest sci-fi movie of the '80s don't make the same mistake I did. Pay a little extra if you have to and settle for the final cut. It's the only way
Blade Runner is meant to be seen.
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