Visually appealing; narratively challenging and with an eye on many-a film making aspects makes Blade Runner somewhat of a success.

Rating: 7/10 (13 April 2010)

Blade Runner will eventually see its two lead characters, or its protagonist and his ultimate goal in tracking something down in the form of another character, share a memorable scene on a roof top of a distant Los Angeles, far into the future. After all of what's gone on and after all the venturing and the talking and the process of investigation, it boils down to one 'evil' character, who's a machine, and one 'just' character, a human-being, interacting; at which point we realise the human-being was a genre archetype and a plain old character following orders given to him by a larger force whereas the robot was a wandering, free spirit whom dared to dream and craved more out of life. The human comes across as more machine-like than the machine, with the machine coming across as more emotional and feeling-filled than the member of the human species. Such is the richness of Blade Runner that tn a lesser film, this exchange wouldn't have taken place and the character of Roy might've been a homicidal robot with a mindless agenda.
Born into a slavery; used and then put through a grinder of negative emotions, Roy revolts and breaks out, consequently freeing himself and allowing himself the ability to explore things at his own pace, opening up his mind and allowing him to explore; learn; love and want to harm those that destroyed what he loved after being an assistant to the system. Blade Runner is like that, an eye on spectacle and scope for its location just as much as it has a spot of affection for its characters in what they think, feel and desire; if indeed they're even interested in anything more than grey trench-coats; glum expressions and order following .
The lead is a certain ex-police officer named Rick Deckard (Ford), a man occupying a glum and gloomy, rain-sodden Los Angeles in 2019; a man of whom trudges through damp, wet streets with many others in a doomy looking; steamy and enclosed Chinatown area as large blimps hover above the mere mortals scrambling around in their squaller advertising breaks away to more tropical, more Utopian places. Director Ridley Scott opens his film with an establishing shot of the entire city, flying cars and the impressive canopy layer of some skyscrapers capturing the beauty and sheer awe within as an accompanying instrumental musical track emphasises both these traits. This is interestingly interjecting with random bursts of flames from vents of some kind, the likes that instill sudden senses of danger and risk of harm; perfectly capturing the world he's about to take us into as the camera very slowly creeps towards the city.
The film gives its lead, Deckard, a mission in the grand tradition of noir in the sense it is his job to find something for someone. In days of old; be it The Maltese Falcon or Murder, My Sweet; noir leads have usually looked for an item or a person. Blade Runner, in all its hybridising glory, has fun with this particular premise in having its lead look for a sort of combination of both: a man/machine hybrid named a Replicant. The chief Replicants in the story, who've gone rouge and are seeking an extension of life, are Pris (Hannah), the film's femme fatale archetype whose birthday the film teasingly places on Valentine's Day; Zhora (Cassidy); Leon Kowalski (James) and the somewhat deranged and equally disturbing in his persistent state of calmness, Roy Batty (Hauer).
Scott gets across a sense of futuristic scope in the film by setting a sequence at the slimiest, seediest and nastiest of run down night spots than you can, but a place that actually comes with advanced video phone technology in the back, suggesting that a sense of technological advancement has reached even these sorts of God-forsaken places. The film's meshing of classical noir with more contemporary science fiction is a given; but the film's hybridising of genres is perhaps best highlighted in a scene involving two characters, a toy manufacturer named Seb (Sanderson) and the aforementioned Pris, whom walk down a hallway of an apartment block towards Seb's home. Lights from outside systematically light up and make dimmer again the hallway, in doing so, casting expressionistic shadows across the walls and floors rendering the location one of both horror and noir as this strange looking woman with an agenda attempts to infiltrate her way in. The sequence is given an added sense of horror when we enter the man's apartment and observe the uncanny array of odd looking moving toys he has made over the years. This strange imagery combines with Pris' overall look in creating something quite terrifying, something the film acknowledges when it has Pris disguise herself as one of these toys later on in another sequence, suggesting a certain 'at one-ness' she shares with the items. The lighting lights the location the whole time with sudden glares and then total darkness, suggesting a sense of light or life that'll shortly come to an end, like an average house light strobing before it dies out.
The film places Deckard on a strand of the detective ilk, he visits places and garners clues to everything which along the way leads him to the character of Rachel (Young), but the film is not an exercise in narrative as much as it is an exercise in technicality and mise-en-scene. Its grim view on man and machine being unable to co-exist in a world full of modernity and technological advancements is highlighted in an early scene involving Leon and a test of some description, as well as later on when Roy essentially kills off his creator, is counter-balanced with Deckard's ability to connect with Replicant Rachel. Blade Runner is an interesting film; a wonderful combining of a maker with a keen eye on the visual and love for one or more genres with complex items and ideas explored accordingly.