Blade Runner

Rating: 10/10 (8 January 2008)

I was very young when I first saw Blade Runner in the theater. I thought it was basically a 1930's detective novel made in the future. However there is so many things written about it, including Ridley Scott's admission that Dekker (played by Harrison Ford) is in reality not a human but a replicant. Now I know there are a lot of "clues" that he is a replicant: The way his eyes glow, the subtle remarks that are made, the unicorn dream etc. etc. However there are some things that make me think he could be a human: the replicants all seem to have superior strength and stamina, Dekker seems like a normal human being. If he was as strong as the replicants, even if he was programmed to "believe" he was human, why didn't that superior strength come to play? It also seemed strange that the other replicants seemed to be unaware that Dekker was a "brother" replicant as well, and if they did, why didn't they try to win him over? Ahhh here's the rub, the Voit Kamp test is supposed to test a person's "empathy" the emotion that the replicant's lacked. Empathy is a person's capacity to feel another person's feelings as like your own. Dekker seems to me in the beginning to be a man who has grown cynical, but his hunt for the replicants brings these emotions back to him. He actually falls in LOVE with a replicant, he witnesses a replicant out to kill him us his last bit of strength to save his life. I think the idea of the story was that aside from the 4 year lifespan, the human condition of the future has actually dehumanized humans until they were really no better than the replicants they created. Yet through his hunt for them, Dekker actually gained back a humanity that he had previously lost. Did anyone ever consider that the movie loses its power if Dekker is a replicant? Is Dekker a replicant? To tell you the truth...I really don't know. I think that so many things were put into the story to cloud and delude people and keep them thinking that there really is no answer, it is up to your own opinion.