Blade Runner

When Blade Runner came out in 1982, it was a flop. Audiences were probably expecting something entirely different. After all, it starred Harrison Ford who had just appeared in two comparatively bright, optimistic sci fi movies (Star Wars: A New Hope and The Empire Strikes Back – maybe you’ve heard of them) as well as the fun, nostalgic Raiders of the Lost Ark. Viewers were likely unprepared for the dark, dystopic, pessimistic story and imagery that awaited them in Blade Runner. So at the time, the film failed to make back its 28 million dollar budget and was seen as a blemish on the track record of both Ford and the film’s director, Ridley Scott. The advent of VHS and home viewing changed things, however, and gave viewers additional chances to reconsider the film – and now, thirty four years later, it is considered to be one of the best, most influential sci fi movies of all time.

Next week, Blade Runner 2049, a sequel produced by Scott and co-starring Ford will arrive in theaters. Directed by Denis Villneuve, the film is set thirty years after the original and features an aging, craggy Ford as former Blade Runner Rick Deckard. Whether it’s a worthy successor to the original remains to be seen (and I will), but this week, I’d like to look back on the original Blade Runner and talk about why it’s still powerful more than three decades later. 

 Set in an ecologically blasted Los Angeles in 2019, the film is the story of Deckard, a retired Blade Runner, or elite cop who hunts and kills Replicants, powerful robots who are almost indistinguishable from humans and who are illegal on Earth. Deckard is recalled into service to find and retire a group of rogue replicants who are trying to literally meet their maker, the head of the corporation that made them.

The film’s masterful visuals are part of why the film endures. The Tyrell Corporation’s massive headquarters that looks like an Aztec temple. The flying cars glaring in the rainy night sky. The lurid, crowded, trash-strewn streets. Replicant Roy Batty punching through a wall as he and Rick Deckard play cat and mouse in an abandoned building. Between the futuristic but still feasible production design of Lawrence Paull and the striking chiaroscuro cinematography by Jordan Cronenweth, Blade Runner looks like both a terrible nightmare of the future and like something very possible. The film presents a complete, persuasive world, and every shot is an atmospheric, claustrophobic masterpiece that is teeming, scuzzy, neon-lit, and rain-slicked.

The film’s marriage of sci fi and film noir also makes it distinct. The story, famously adapted from Philip K. Dick’s Do Androids Dream of Electric Sheep, borrows just as much from The Big Sleep and The Lady of Shanghai. Deckard is a morally ambiguous protagonist trying to get to the bottom of a mystery as he slouches through the dark, rainy streets in his trenchcoat with the upturned collar and a gun under his arm. Rachel, a high-end replicant Deckard wants to protect, is both sexually potent and extremely vulnerable to the various men who surround her, and she shifts her allegiances as necessary for self-preservation like any good femme fatale. And as is the case with most noirs, the city, in this case Los Angeles 2019, is a sprawling metaphor for how humanity has lost itself and become choked with the garbage of its own commercial consumption and moral apathy.

Blade Runner was ahead of its time. Audiences of 1982 weren’t prepared for its darkness or its beauty, but fortunately, we’ve had time to reconsider. If you haven’t seen it yet, you should. Don’t go in looking for a lighthearted time, but do go in prepared to examine every beautiful shot, every compelling sequence and to think about how you interpret the film’s messages about what it is to be truly human. Blade Runner, more than most films, gives viewers both a visual feast and philosophical questions to answer.