A classic in the Sci Fi genre

Rating: 10/10 (10 November 2009)

This movie is great on so many levels. In terms of an urban dystopia it reminds me a lot of Terry Gilliam's "Brazil" (Or should I say it foreshadowed "Brazil" since it was made three years earlier). It is one of the rare films that does not paint all in black and white, and in the end you feel mixed emotions, sorry for the replicants and realize perhaps the villain of the piece was actually Dr. Tyrrel playing God with increasingly human-like androids which, like beautiful but flawed automobiles, are cursed with "planned obsolescence." And who hasn't been in an interview situation like that with which the film opens where some slick, supercilious HR type is trying to pigeonhole you with a few questions? I couldn't help but cheer for Leon as he blows him away. The Tyrrel corporation is evil, as the way they are playing God with the replicants makes clear.
The other, less prosperous techno-nerds of the piece come off somewhat better. The Chinese eye designer in the cold room, and J.F. Sebastian, the ultimate nerd, who lives alone with his "toys" in a crumbling run down apartment building called "The Bradbury" in a tip of the hat to another great science Fiction writer. (I guess you couldn't have called the apartment building "The Dick" after Phillip K. Dick, the writer from whose novel this film was drawn.) Sebastian (William Sanderson) is a prematurely old genetic engineer who has created his own phantasmagorical world in his large flat. Like his creations the replicants, he has a limited life span, only in his case it is a medical condition and not as withthe Nexus 6 model replicants caused by a pre-determined limitation on their life span.
In the middle of this is the title character, the Blade Runner, otherwise known as Deckard (Harrison Ford) and Gaff (Edward James Olmos) who keeps Deckard from wandering off in disgust, and who has a strange habit of leaving samples of origami wherever he goes. The Blade Runner falls in love with a beautiful replicant (Sean Young) who doesn't even know she is a replicant, at first. Deckard dutifully goes about his business, tracking down and "retiring" the outlaw replicants, but clearly seems in the end caught in the middle of a moral dilemma.
In the end the story is a parable of the sadness and shortness of life, which for those of us in middle life becomes ever more poignant. It seems clear we are all programmed to die by our maker.