Taking a Cue from Fritz Lang

Rating: 10/10 (9 June 2006)

Even when the date that the story takes place in is only 14 years in the future and automatically cancels much of the technology and events shown in Ridley Scotts sci-fi noir film BLADE RUNNER, it's still a stunning movie that has more than enough elements to make it compulsively watchable. The story of one Rick Deckard, a bounty hunter out to eliminate a handful of renegade replicants (i. e. androids), and how he fell in love with one of them, was adapted from Philip K. Dick's short story "Do Androids Dream of Electric Sheep?" and is extremely claustrophobic. One would never know that this was Los Angeles; the sun never shines, colors are muted, and there is an element of sick-green corruption all around. Stylistically it moves at a steady pace, never pausing for cute moments. Rutger Hauer, Daryl Hannah, Brion James, Sean Young, and Joanna Cassidy are quite impressive in their renditions of the replicants -- particularly Hauer and Hannah who have some truly memorable sequences of extremely disquieting violence, violence that is a reaction to their one dream, which is to live. One poignant sequence involves Harrison Ford explaining to Sean Young that her memories were implanted to her and thus, are not real. I thought that was the cruelest part of the movie, because it was like telling your own creation that he or she did not have a "life" until you gave it to them, and somehow that carries an undertone of inhumanity about it. There has been the speculation, by the way, that Ford's character could also be a replicant, but somehow that doesn't seem to be the case in the movie: he's just a cop with a mission to complete. That he decides to spare Rachael's "life" shows a human aspect about him -- that he wasn't all orders, even when the romance in itself is perfunctory to say the least. A sad, but beautiful nightmare of a film, it works whether you see it with Ford's voice-over or not.