**** (Out of four)

Rating: 10/10 (5 May 1999)

A pivotal movie in my many years of cinematic fascination, I had only seen "Blade Runner" for the first time in October, 1998, which meant that I had seen various films inspired from it, such as Luc Besson's "The Fifth Element" and even Tim Burton's two "Batman"'s before I got the chance to lose myself in the elaborately constructed Los Angeles of this film. Of course I have subjected myself to both versions, and of course the Director's Cut is better, but still this is beside the point. For a film made seventeen years ago and culminating with the kind of visceral fascination and kinetic cinemania that this one inspires is almost unheard of. We could get into arguments about the relative outdatedness of even the most classic of films (even those nifty hippie-inspired stewardess wardrobes in Kubrick's "2001" look hopelessly tacky today); "Blade Runner" however, still holds its own. A beautiful piece of cinema, everything in this film comes together like clockwork. Jordan Croenworth's cinematography, Douglas Trumbull's special effects, the performances of Harrison Ford (who showed his relative worth as an actor first in this film, not Peter Weir's "Witness"), Rutger Hauer, Daryl Hannah and Sean Young at her most soulful, and most notably, Ridley Scott's meticulous direction make this one of the great films. How could I forget Vangelis's score? Who could dispute the evocative dreaminess of the scene where Young lets her hair down at the piano as Vangelis's electronic palette of eerily beautiful melancholia reaches its crescendo? Or the bluesy overtones of the scene where Ford analyzes a photograph and cries of childhood are subliminally heard in the background? Or in one of the most poignant sequences in cinematic history, at the end on the rooftop, the perfect combination of music, imagery and dialogue. Don't get me wrong, I believe "2001" to be a film of enormous versimilitude; it is quite possibly the greatest sci-fi of all time (it is certainly the most ambitious); "Blade Runner" though creating a world with as much ingenuity and pizazz as ever before seen in cinema, is a much more subtle work and offers an opposing side as to the haunting effect of cinema; Scott's direction at least deserved an Oscar nomination, as did the film itself, the cinematography, the music, the film editing and the sound (they all failed to resound a single nod in all of the aforementioned categories). The only other sci-fi film I would compare this to as to having the same subtle reach and beautiful realization of cinematic artistry would be Peter Weir's "The Truman Show", a film which is, like "Blade Runner", less science fiction and more of a foretelling of things to come. The Academy of Motion Picture Arts and Sciences must not like being reminded of the gloom and doom that the world is apparently headed toward: I don't blame them, for it's nice to think of a world with no conceivable problems. But their relative lack of any type of cinematic appreciation is unforgivable especially in the past few years: the comforting strains of "Gandhi" and "E.T." over "Blade Runner"? This is a great film, no matter what the box-office receipts or Roger Ebert or Leonard Maltin think about it.