Essential Sci-Fi

Rating: 10/10 (5 July 2008)

Blade Runner is one of those films which most people are willing to call a classic. Blade Runner is a great example of how a sci-fi film and despotic vision of the future should be made. It also shows how good a director Ridley Scott is and is Harrison Ford's best performance as an actor (but I do like him in Indiana Jones and Star Wars).
The film is set in Los Andreas in 2019, 37 years into the future when the film was made. Humans had started to colonise space and use clones (called replicants) as slave labour. After a revolution replicants are banned on Earth and are hunted down by Blade Runners if any make to the planet. Harrison Ford plays Rick Deckard, a top blade runner who had gone into retirement. Five special replicants make it to Los Andreas, all breed to be super strong and able to fight. Deckard is asked by the company who made them to hunt them down. This is a tough task for the blade runner which rises questions within him about whether he is doing the right thing and asks ideas about humanity.
What Blade Runner does is asked a lot of questions to the audience and makes them thing. It is a complex film in that way. It varies from issues of cloning and slavery to issues of environmentalism and over-population. It also shows ideas like two different classes being formed, an rich-upper class and a poor-lower class, possibly influenced by Marxist ideology and other sci-fi and despotic cultural items like 1984, A Clockwork Orange and Metropolis. The film also looks at the character of Deckard as he starts to doubt the task he is doing. A big debate within the fans of Blade Runner is where Deckard is a human or a replicant. I personally favour he is a human, but that is just my interpretation of it. The film is also influenced by film noir and has been called future-noir. It does have that feel to it and is a little like a detective story, showing Deckard's investigation. The music is also fitting for the film, similar to the music to film noir films. The music also reminds me of the first Championship Manager game, which is downloadable from the SI games website (the makes of the Championship Manager and later Football Manager games).
Blade Runner was based on a Philip K. Dick novel, 'Do Androids Dream of Electric Sheep?'. Philip K. Dick is considered to be a brilliant sci-fi writer, I have only read one of his books, the Man in the High Castle, which was pretty good. His ideas have been converted to films. Some have been very good like Total Recall and Minority Report, but also some bad ones like Next and Paycheck. Blade Runner is easily the best film based on a Philip K. Dick idea. This is because as well as a good story Ridley Scott shows both a very grim version of the future, but at the same time a grand awe-powering version (Speilberg and Verhoeven, took a similar approach).
Blade Runner is a must see film, especially for sci-fi fans.