Most influential film since Star Wars

Rating: 10/10 (3 June 2002)

There is little left to be said about this seminal masterpiece, but I would like to draw your attention to something different.
Books have been published about the era-defining visuals, the hellish production and confused post-production and release saga. This is THE future noire film, an entrancing world whose existence and ideas are much more interesting than any of its events. Harrison Ford serves as a conduit and Sean Young is the perfect synthetic femme fatale, but the center of gravity is and always has been Rutger Hauer's Roy Blatty, the first and last artificial aryan superman.
You should see this of course, and probably already have. If so, let's consider Rutger Hauer for a while, the man revealed by fellow Dutch filmmaker Paul Verhoeven's Soldier of Orange and Flesh + Blood. Two very different films, in turn hopelessly different from Blade Runner. Three different characters than nonetheless all reach a state of grace, of distant peace and that sense of withholding secrets from us. That is what Rutger Hauer was at that point in time, perhaps the only male star to ever give us a flesh and blood version of the Mona Lisa's enigmatic smile, and never was that complex smile so fraught with significance than in the last minutes of Blade Runner.
I hold Blade Runner before not as one of the most influential and best films of all time. it is. I would like you, for the briefest of moments, to consider how it was so successful in capturing and redefining many of our subconscious artistic reference points, not just of what a modern cityscape might look like, but what modern humans and their artificial progeny might experience and feel. What Ridley Scott has done here, is not show us the future, as many people suspected: he has allowed us to touch it.