Good to look at, not much fun

Rating: Null/10 (15 August 1999)

The staggering cult popularity of this film, even seventeen years after its release, is easy to understand. It's a visual masterpiece, a film with a look all its own (most sci-fi fans prefer this to "Dark City"). It has a plentitude of theological and philosophical subtexts, so fans can wax literate about all the "meaning" that it has. It's "2001" for action fans.
The plot (skip to the next paragraph if you don't want spoilers) goes like this: synthetic people called replicants, stationed on the "off-world," are upset with their second-banana position in society and their limited life spans (apparently they were becoming too human), and rebel. They kill a bunch of their human supervisors -- by the way, all this happens before the story begins -- and head to L.A. to meet their maker (get it?), to ask him to extend their life spans past four years. Rick Deckard (sourpuss Harrison Ford), once a champion hunter of replicants, is called back from his retirement to go out and take them down. Along the way he falls in love with a replicant named Rachel (Sean Young -- one of the rebels? we're never really told), but still pursues his quarry. In the end he kills all but one replicant (Rutger Hauer, who's very good here). That replicant has killed the orignal replicant designer, but saves Deckard's life. After this, he (the replicant) expires and shuts down. Deckard returns to his apartment to see if Rachel is still alive. The ambiguous ending tells us that the couple may or may not be hunted by Gaff (Edward James Olmos, playing the Claude Rains role).
For those who find the Greater Meanings to messy, inconsistent, disorganized and overcooked (like me) can still enjoy those primo visuals, and maybe even the Vangelis score, but they probably won't have much fun otherwise. There isn't much in the way of action sequences, though Ridley Scott does include plenty of shooting, bone breaking, skull crushing and eye gouging, and the story is pretty illogical (part of that can be blamed on the altering of some of Philip K. Dick's original ideas). Even for those people, however, "Blade Runner" definitely remains worth a look.