these are just comments - but it IS the best film I've ever seen

Rating: 10/10 (3 October 1998)

So myriads of people have spoken on Blade Runner - most of whom probably have good ideas and are insightful and so on. If you love the movie, I'm with you, but the damn thing ALWAYS makes me cry; so after about the tenth time I watched it over a 10 year period (I drink when I watch it) I finally realised that besides the very incredible cast, and the interesting story, there was something else swilling around at the bottom of the movie that inevitably made me blub at the end. Sean Young is gorgeous of course, but so? The real message of the movie is this: that Deckard [the protaganist], could fall in love with an android - something pretty much against ALL his training. By the end of the movie we see that people [you, me, the protagonist] can fall in love with anything, just so long as it is able to capture your heart. It is THE movie that is totally anti-bigot, that strips taboo down to raw emotion and declares "if your heart WANTS this, you won't be able to stop it". It is a movie about forbidden love, taboo, intrigue, death and life: pretty juicy stuff. And the unspoken message is simply 'people will give their hearts away to whoever will pay their price, and furthermore, they won't be able to help themselves'. Because, if you remember, ol' Sean is just a machine - an appliance really, a big, complicated vaccuum cleaner with an incredibly great face, but still a machine; just a machine. And to prove the point, there he is, the android Roy Batty who in the end loved life so much that he would not even take the life of his would-be killer. It's THAT message about the individual: that the Nazi can fall in love with the beautiful Jewish chick; that the militant black guy can be transfixed by the innocent white girl; that the boundaries of race or creed or color, or even of flesh and blood, are actually no boundaries at all... that if Deckard can cross them, anybody can. He falls in love with an android, and shows us that no matter how you were trained or raised or brought up, there is the possibility of love... that somewhere in time, even if we are "sushi" - even if we are cold fish - we can love anything, or anyone.