A dreamland dystopia where humanity has been absorbed by its own disastrous creations.

Rating: 10/10 (18 September 2003)

This is, quite simply, the best Sci-Fi movie ever made, and one of the finest movies of any genre. Recently a Final Cut was issued on DVD. It restores some scenes that were taken out before to the film's detriment, but suffers also from a softening of one of the greatest lines in history. (When Roy Batty meets Dr. Tyrell, he confronts his maker with the line "I want more life, f**ker." This version (and others) softens the line to "I want more life, father." indicating the relationship between Roy and Tyrell. I liked it better the other way.)
The story is fraught with allegory, laden with existentialism. If you try to take it too literally, you will be missing the point. It will be hard to digest the themes if you are not familiar with the writings of Descartes, Foucualt, Kierkegaard, or Nietzsche, which probably precludes the vast majority of viewers from fully appreciating the film.
Blade Runner is based on the short story Do Androids Dream of Electric Sheep, written by the legendary Philip K. Dick, whose visionary plot-twisting epics include Total Recall (I Can Dream That For You Wholesale) and Minority Report, which was, sadly, defiled by being made into a Tom Cruise vehicle. Dick would have rolled over in his grave, since he loathed Hollywood for exactly such reasons.
So why was this movie made? So a generation of lesser films would have a vast and bleak vision to imitate in countless rip-offs, take-offs, and send-ups. But none ever approach the stark and visionary brilliance of Blade Runner.
Harrison Ford plays a Blade Runner, basically, an Android Hunter. A band of marauding androids, called Replicants, have violated Earth law by coming on-world. The year is 2019, and Earth is a post-apocalyptic nightmare cloaked in a perpetual drizzle and darkness. Ford is charged with hunting down the Replicants and destroying them.
Now, there's too much to lay out here, but the Replicants have been preprogrammed by their makers to live only a short time. This prevents them from getting delusions of grandeur. Here is where you lose most casual observers. The Replicants represent Man, and his yearning for immortality is manifested in the angst these creatures feel at their impending doom. Why do we die? Why were we born in the first place? What is the meaning of our lives and our relationship with our creator?
Now imagine that you had the chance to ask God these very things. This is exactly what happens when the lead Replicant, Roy, played by Rutger Hauer in his absolutely finest hour, meets Tyrell, the man who invented Replicants. Let's just say the meeting goes less than swimmingly, and the rage Roy feels afterward is the essence of the human struggle with the meaning and futility of life. In perfect human form, Roy literally dispenses with God and continues to search for meaning to his arbitrarily limited life.
Harrison Ford famously disliked working in this film and with Ridley Scott, whose relentless demand for perfection frustrated Ford. Ford was apparently also dissatisfied with his character, whom he saw as weak. In fact, Deckert is, despite Ford's disdain for playing him, a subtle and nuanced character, fiercely conflicted, who shoots women in the back, drinks too much, and falls in love with his quarry, all the while stalking beings who only want what he wants, to live.
The women in the movie are all breathtaking in their own way. Darryl Hannah is the exotic beauty, a Replicant designed, as her dossier explains, as a pleasure model. In a great example of attention to detail, her character, Pris, has an incept date of February 14, which is what one would expect for a pleasure model. Zora, played by Joanna Cassidy, is described as "beauty and the beast" since she is a trained killer. This duality is reflected in her dossier as well, since she is a Gemini, the perfect sign for duality. I could go on, but suffice it to say that there are endless such gems in the details.
The film, with all its allusions, climaxes in the final confrontation between Deckert and Batty. It is confessional, elegiac and powerful. Batty faces his end clutching a white dove, a touch added by Rutger Hauer himself, in much the same way we consider our own souls as we face death, and if by now you haven't fully realized the ultimate allusion of the film, recall that Batty his a nail piercing his hand.
The ultimate question to consider is whether Deckert himself is a Replicant, but you cannot fully weigh that question unless you watch the movie multiple times, and even then you will have to make a judgment call. It would not be characteristic of Dick to reveal any definitive answer to that question, so your answer will have to come from you as you consider your own ideas of life, existence, mortality and immortality, God, and destiny. Goodness. How could we ask more of a movie?
Ridley Scott's direction melds in a miraculous synergy with Vangelis' superb, minimalist score. The result is a thought-provoking classic that raises, but doesn't quite answer, the most elemental questions of existence in a dreamland dystopia where humanity has been absorbed by its own disastrous creations.
If you've never seen this movie, watch the original theatrical release with the extended footage. The commentary makes the story easier to follow, and since Dick will mess your mind like a master, most first time viewers need the commentary. (Indeed, it was added post-production, because Scott feared most viewers wouldn't understand the plot. He was right.)
If you're familiar with Blade Runner, then watch the Director's Cut, or the newer Final Cut. The Sam Spade commentary is gone, and what is left is a desolate but magnificent voyage into the very best that Sci-Fi has to offer.