Movie Info
Movie Name: Blade Runner
Studio: The Ladd Company/Shaw Brothers/Warner Bros.
Genre(s): Sci-Fi/Fantasy
Release Date(s): June 25, 1982
MPAA Rating: R
Welcome to the future…It sucks
A group of Nexus-6 Replicants has escaped to Earth in 2019. They only have four year lifespans, but Blade Runner Richard Decker (Harrison Ford) has been brought back to bring them in by his former supervisor Bryant (M. Emment Walsh). Decker learns the Tyrell Corporations newest models are almost unidentifiable by the Voight-Kampff test, and now Dekker finds himself involved with Replicant named Rachel (Sean Young) as he tries to hunt down the dangerous androids…time is fleeting and the Replicants want more time.
Directed by Ridley Scott, Blade Runner is a science-fiction action-drama. The movie is a loose adaptation of the 1968 short novel Do Androids Dream of Electric Sheep by Philip K. Dick. The film received positive reviews but underperformed at the box office. The film received Academy Award nominations for Best Art Direction-Set Decoration and Best Visual Effects and was selected by the Library of Congress for preservation in the national Film Registry in 1993.
Are you testing if I’m a Replicant or a lesbian?
Blade Runner was one of those legendary movies as a kid…until you saw it. When you were young you were promised a sci-fi movie starring Indiana Jones and Han Solo battling robots, but instead it was a thinking movie about life-and-death and man-and-machine…it was something that couldn’t be appreciated at the time but has grown.
The story for the film is rather slow paced and built as a noir detective thriller…that just happens to be set in the future. The characters are debating the reality they live in. It is dirty and depressing…but they all still want to live. The Replicants are just trying to cling to more life as they are hunted. The Replicants are just as human (if not more human) than the humans but treated as machines.
Oh, Sebastian…I’m your friend to the end
The film underwent multiple versions (finishing with Blade Runner: The Final Cut released in 2007). Most of the versions play with the reality of Decker. The movie implies that Decker is also a Replicant and doesn’t know he’s a Replicant…which explains a lot about his life and dreams. The movie doesn’t ever pick a side of this idea (though Blade Runner 2049 did provide answers).
The cast is good. Ford is brooding as he hunts the Replicants, and Sean Young is cool and detached as Rachel. Edward James Olmos and M. Emment Walsh play the police who have commissioned Deckard to bring in the Replicants while William Sanderson plays the doomed Sebastian. James Hong plays one of the Replicant creators along with Joe Turkel who is the head of Tyrell Corporation. The stars of the movie are the Replicants. Joanna Cassidy and Brion James are the less defined Replicants with Daryl Hannah and Rutger Hauer playing the scene stealing Batty and Pris. They nail their roles being both creepy and sympathetic and sad.
Like tears in the rain…time to die
The movie excels in its visuals that still hold up. Done through practical effects, the movie presented a dystopian world that is dark and menacing. You have a mash-up of different cultures and an overload of advertising and corporate greed. It creates a very real world that is also kind of terrifying.
Blade Runner is a classic. It asks the right questions and presents those questions in a great looking package with a good cast. The movie is a film that gets better through multiple viewings. Will Decker and Rachel make it? No one lives forever… Blade Runner was followed by Blade Runner 2049 in 2017.
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