All shine and no substance

Rating: 3/10 (6 February 2020)

I saw this when it came out, and I didn't like it. I just saw it again for the first time in many years, and I still don't like it. I know a lot of people live this movie due to it's lush and highly-detailed staging. However, I don't like it for exactly that reason. Ridley Scott put all his effort into set decoration and staging, and absolutely no effort whatsoever into story or character development.
"Blade Runner" takes place in a future (for 1982) Los Angeles where it rains ALL THE TIME, where it is always night and never day and where, for reasons that are never explained, nobody ever turns on a light switch. The only lights at all are generated by garish, flashing advertisements that, for reasons that are never explained, nobody ever shuts out by drawing the curtains. If I lived in such a place I would draw my curtains and switch on my lights but, as I say, in the Los Angeles of the future, it seemingly never occurs to anybody to do that.
The plot, where there is of it, revolves around a policeman whose job is to kill cyborgs who are supposed to live only "off-world" when they escape and return to Earth. However, unlike every other policeman I have ever heard of, he is expected to carry out his duties alone, without any back-up, and completely unsupported. There is one police character who dogs his tracks but, for reasons that are never explained (a lot in Blade Runner is never explained) he seems to constitute more of a nuisance than a help. In fact, he seems to have been assigned solely to keep tabs on the main character, rather than to aid him in any way.
The cyborgs have several opportunities to kill the main character which, for reasons that are never explained, they each bungle clumsily. These cyborgs, who are supposedly super-human, super-strong killers, simply can't seem to bring themselves to kill this guy. Mostly they fail because they are too busy showing off to kill him. However, I suppose that, if they simply killed him, there would be no movie.
Blade Runner might have made a good 1/2-hour "Twilight Zone", or 1-hour "Outer Limits" episode. However, it simply doesn't have enough substance for a full-length motion picture. Consequently, Ridley Scott pads it out lots and lots of shots of dystopian scenery which had absolutely nothing to the story.