A machine to detect human-ness ?

Rating: 10/10 (15 January 2006)

Ridley Scott's 1982 film of Philip K. Dick's novel 'Do Androids Dream of Electric Sheep' is set in Los Angeles in about the year 2019.
By this time, much manual work is done by robots or 'humanoids', especially in 'off-world' colonies. Despite its dated hi-technology, the film takes us into a grubby world where sophisticated electronics has done little to improve the underlying shortcomings of the human beings who live there.
In fact, the more their technology develops, the more difficult it becomes to work out quite who or what is 'mechanical' and who is genuinely human.
Some people, however, have the knack of finding out. Not the least of these is our hero Rick Deckard (Harrison Ford). When the machines go haywire and begin to start thinking for themselves, Deckard is tasked to seek them out and destroy them. Not a task that need raise any moral qualms in a civilised society  it's just like switching off the dish-washer.
That's until we get to meet some of these sophisticated machines. Once we get to know Roy Batty (Rutger Hauer), Leon (Brion James), Pris (Daryl Hannah) and most of all Rachael (Sean Young) our confidence that these humanoids are simply machines starts to get a little shaky.
Along with Rick Deckard, we begin to feel something for these 'machines' which we are not accustomed to feeling for household appliances.
By the time we finally encounter the maker of this mischief, Mr Tyrell (Joe Turkel), we are even less sure of who is the man and who is the machine. And as we get to know his lonely right hand man J.F. Sebastian (William Sanderson) our sense of the borderline between man and machine becomes uncomfortably cloudy.
This film challenges our sense of what being 'human' really is and puts before us an awful vision of what we might become if we ever lose sight of it.