By Pentadact

Aftershock: I just studied Blade Runner, in a comparative study with frankenstein for school. Thinking about it this way sheds a whole new light on the movie, thanks.

Emily: Yeah, but still would though.

Gump: But the kids love him.

Tweets that mention Deckard, Blade Runner, Moron, by Tom Francis -- Topsy.com: [...] This post was mentioned on Twitter by patrick h. lauke and Tom Francis, Brendan Caldwell. Brendan Caldwell said: RT @Pentadact: I watched Blade Runner again, and it turns out Deckard is a terrible idiot. Here is why: http://bit.ly/blademoron [...]

Mr Ak: Isn't that the point, though? The replicants are meant to be smarter and faster and stronger. The only one who Deckard kills is Priss, and she's the only one who's not a combat model.

Joe!: @ Mr Ak

I thought Deckard was a replicant though? At least in one of the fucking 721 endings they made.

Director's edition, Studio's edition, Editor's edition, Limited edition, Theatric edition, HD edition, Producer's edition, etc etc

But I must point out Ridley Scott is a self centred ass. Every single movie he makes is filled with stupid fake hollywood rain, smoke fucking EVERYWHERE, and slow turning fans in every background.

Pr3: @ Joe!

Even Gladiator?

nine: On topic: He's only as dumb as every other action movie ever, really. I mean, every action movie hero hesitates when given the opportunity to kill the bad guy.

Off topic: Just seeing those stills brings the movie back to life. What a visual feast.

Apropos: I was hoping you were going to mention Blade Runner in relation to Inception. I can't quite pin down why, but the movie Inception reminds me most strongly of is Blade Runner. The ambiguous ending probably doesn't help, but I think it's something more abstract than that.

Chris: Harrison Ford wasn't too happy with the role either. He described it as "A detective who doesn't do any detecting."

verendus: Yeah, this is what turned me off to the movie when I first saw it, some ten years ago; it seemed like the main character was the only one who didn't do anything.

Tony: To be fair, this is film-noir - it's practically obligatory for the detective to arrive at the solution by a process of getting (a) beaten up and (b) lied to by women. One of the reasons I love Kiss Me Deadly so much is because it takes the other option: Thuggish Detective Beats The Living Crap Out Of Everyone.

Mr Ak: Okay, he's not Sherlock Holmes, but what does he do that's actually actively stupid? (Except for missing Priss completely, I agree with you there.) Missing Roy through a wall, not seeing Leon and then losing the fight with him, not fooling Zhora... I suppose he is a bit useless, actually, but I still don't know if I agree about "stupid". He's got an impossible task with no resources - he can't bring anything to the media, the planet's half deserted, there's no manpower to call on. He's got two leads - the video of Leon and the fact that it was taken at the Tyrell Corporation. I mean, it's not like he could look up the inception dates and figure out their motivation... Um. It's not like the police department could just keep a watch on people with direct access to Tyrell, or murders related to geneticists...

(That's assuming they killed the eye man. People generally kill people they quote Milton at, I've found. Poetry lovers. They're murdering sorts.)

Okay, fine. A proper police force could get it sorted much more easily (and that's even without CCTV and facial recognition). But then again, a proper evil geneticist would take the Jurassic Park solution to engineering a slave race and have them with traceable dietary requirements. And come to think of it, a properly trained, murdering assassin type wouldn't leave a body at a crime scene to be traced back to the place he's staying at.

I suppose I'm arguing that within the limited stylistic confines of the narrative, Deckard's... alright. Clever-ish.

@ Joel
Yeah, in one of the Director's Cuts it's hinted at. By a unicorn. In a dream. Never made much sense to me, though, so I tend to ignore it and hope it goes away.

Chris: There are several clues that Deckard is a replicant. Deckard's collection of photos mirrors Leon's, his private memory of a unicorn that Gaff seems to be aware of (hence leaving an origami unicorn at Deckard's apartment) mirrors Deckard's knowledge of Rachel's childhood memories, and the most telling, a scene where Deckard stands behind Rachel, slightly out of focus, and his eyes glow the same way Rachel's do during the VK test.

The screenwriter originally had some lines in the script comparing Deckard and Roy Batty, pointing out that Deckard is as much a machine as the replicants, following his "programming" like a good little robot. When Batty catches Deckard as he falls from the roof, he even yells "Kinship!"

But in the script, this was all meant to be metaphorical. When Ridley Scott saw the references, however, he took them as literal and decided Deckard was a replicant, hence the glowing eyes and unicorns.

Graham: It's been a long time since I've seen Blade Runner, but it's a trope in noir or pulp fiction that the hero be basically incompetent. They make a mess, get beaten up repeatedly, but eventually succeed through luck and relentless determination. Deckard fits the noir detective bill, though I can't remember the specifics of his encounters.

This is why I like Indiana Jones so much. He fails relentlessly. Take Raiders of the Lost Ark, and run through it moment by moment. In the opening of the film, everyone on Indy's team betrays or abandons him; he sets off the traps when trying to clevely remove the idol from the temple; and he barely escapes with his life before being immediately forced to hand the idol over to his arch rival.

He then goes off on a quest to find the Ark. He meets Marion, who slaps him and successfully lies to him about the object he's looking for. The second Indy leaves, the Nazis turn up and steal it. The eventual conclusion of the film is: Indy and Marion are captured, tied up, and the Nazis succeed in retrieving the Ark. Indy's only saved by his eyelids.

This kind of failure is my favourite quality in movie characters. There's a great article about this somewhere, or at least a TV Trope page, but I can't find either.

See also: Brick. Brendan is a little cleverer than Indy or, by the sounds of it, Deckard. But the girl he's doing everything for rejected him, is dead, and he spends much of the film getting beaten up. He fights Tug and progresses in his investigation not by winning, but by continually getting up.

MartinJ: What is this Brick you speak of?

Bret: It's a Film Noir set in an American high school starring the kind from 3rd Rock from the Sun. The actors were heavily discouraged from watching classic Noir. Instead, they were told to watch comedies.

As you can guess from the description, an incredibly good straight up Noir film.

(No joke. It is good.)

MartinJ: Oh right I actually saw that just a while ago and just forgot the name and the main character. The movie was great, like a fresh breath to Film Noir, putting it in somewhat modern setting. loved it.

Mr Ak: Crap. It was Blake, not Milton.

Bret: Either way, Poetry lovers are not to be trusted.

Dr. Disaster: This might be nothing but my own unsubstantiated attempt to fill in the gaps, but I always had the impression Decker sucked at his job because his heart wasn't in it anymore. I haven't seen the movie in a while, so all these details are fuzzy, but as I recall, he was a star replicant hunter because of work he did years before the movie started. By the time the audience sees him, he wonders whether he's on the right side or not, just like they do. He keeps putting himself in situations where, if the replicants wanted, they could all just sit down and have a chat.

Of course, because of who he is, they react violently. This plays into the propaganda that they're mindless killers, or at least gets his blood up long enough for him to do his job. He coasts along in this way until he meets Rachel. Because she doesn't know what she is, she doesn't attack him, and his doubts finally have an opportunity to really take root. The rest of the film is him barely doing his job at all, because he's slowly realizing that he's just a murderer for hire.

Dr. Disaster: Decker? Deckard.

I'm dumber than he is.

Dejanigma: As correct as your analysis of his performance is, I think it misses the point of WHY Deckard has such dismal performance. If you read other PKD books such as Galactic Pot Healer, the hero is always an anti-hero, someone totally unlikely to be remarkable. When they are faced with problems there seems to be a divine hand that comes down and rescues them, not their own inner virtue that saves the day. This theme carries through many of Dick's works, the heroes usually can't even come up with explanations for why they succeed. I think this is one of the brilliant aspects of Dick's works, that no one, the author, the audience, the characters, has any explanation as to why things turned out the way they did.

SenatorPalpatine: You're being a little hard on Deckard. He's got a really tough job, cut him some slack.

Him doing a terrible job and barely succeeding is a big part of making Blade Runner what it is. If he was a brilliant detective and found and killed everyone easily, the movie would no longer be one of the best ever.

james: Bryant say's he is the best at what he does...doesn't inspire any confidence in the Blade Runner unit, does it.

If Deckard is a replicant, you think they'd give him some of the advantages of the combat models - given he is meant to be hunting them, after all. At least give him upgraded smarts, like Roy, if nothing obvious like Roy or Leon's strength.

Freakoftheuniverse: A great man once described Deckard as the "hero" who "Shot 2 chicks in the back and raped a dishwasher". And for all it's coarseness, it's strangly accurate.

Jaz: @freakoftheuniverse: lol