Blade Runner

Fortunately, it found a new life on video and DVD and is now considered one of the most influential science fiction movies ever made.

Ridley Scott's Blade Runner

Director Ridley Scott, who also directed Alien, brought his own unique look to this feature. Set in a futuristic multi-ethnic Los Angeles dominated by Times-Square-like electronic billboards, it is at once glittering and bleak. Harrison Ford, fresh from filming Raiders of the Lost Ark, stars as former Blade Runner Rick Decker.

Blade Runners are a special kind of hunter - they find and 'retire' escaped replicants, artificial people created for hazardous duties that natural people are unwilling to risk themselves doing.

Throw-away people

Replicants are indistinguishable from natural people except through weirdly sophisticated psychological tests. They have a build-in obsolescence, designed to keep them from getting out of hand - their lifespan is four years. They are thought to be unable to feel human emotions, although it becomes clear that the four-year life cycle is meant to prevent them from developing human emotions.

Made by the megapowerful Tyrell Corporation, replicants are not allowed by law on Earth; they must be shipped immediately to their duty stations in the asteroids or other non-earth locations. Yet somehow, a group of replicants have managed to escape surveillance and return to Earth, where they have already killed one Blade Runner. Rick Decker is hauled out of retirement to track them down.

The Hunt

As Decker hunts down the infiltrating replicants, he discovers one hiding in plain sight, Dr. Tyrell's ward and secretary, Rachel (Sean Young). An experimental model, Tyrell has given her artificial memories of a childhood and family, to see if replicants can enjoy a more human emotional life. And of course, they can.

The four off-earth replicants meanwhile are on a search of their own; in search of the scientist who created them. They believe that their lifespan is something that can be altered, that by deactivating a component or changing a line of code, their maker can give them back a full human lifespan. Alas for such expectations, their lifespans are encoded in their entire makeup - while it is possible to create new replicants will full lifespans, existing replicants are out of luck.

The replicants, led by Roy Batty (Rutger Hauer in a breakout performance) are ruthless, heartless and will torture or kill to get what they want. And yet they ultimately earn the viewer's sympathy; their situation is so unfair, their creation and use so immoral, that it's hard to fault them for their reaction.

Box Office Failure, Now a Recognized Classic

Perhaps the movie disappointed both critics and viewers because of its complex moral ambiguity. Even Decker comes to recognize that he might be fighting on the wrong side. When Roy Batty uses the last minutes of his four-year life to save Decker's, the irony is bitter with no leavening of sweetness. The white dove that Batty releases with his death begs the question, not Do Androids Dream of Electric Sheep, but Do Artificial Replicants have Immortal Souls?

This film just gets better every time you view it.