Blade Runner: The Final Cut

Among the most discussed and influential science fiction films ever made, Ridley Scott’s adaptation filters Philip K Dick’s novel Do Androids Dream of Electric Sheep? through a retro noir sensibility appropriate to the Los Angeles setting.

Harrison Ford is Deckard, a “blade runner” hired to “retire” four rogue replicants – organic robots so lifelike they don’t even know they’re not human. In the course of his pursuit, Deckard falls in love with another replicant (Sean Young), and comes to question his own – ambiguous – humanity.

Although the plot is thin, the movie’s visuals are astonishingly layered. Scott’s imagination knows no bounds here. The movie’s spectacular cityscapes are reminiscent of Metropolis, while the street level scenes give equally vivid impressions of a social fabric torn every which way. A failure at the box office, Blade Runner became a key cult movie, and was among the first titles to benefit from a restored director’s cut. Scott’s signature style – that painstakingly detailed, highly art-directed, frequently backlit sheen – would become the dominant fashion, not only in Hollywood movies but also in marketing, magazines, and across popular culture in music videos and TV.

In 1982 when it first came out, most audiences didn’t really buy into Scott’s vision of the future: towering mega corporations presiding over street level squalor, technology erasing the boundaries between man and machine. It’s become harder to dismiss with every passing year.

Blade Runner was ahead of its time and as poignant as any sci-fi film I know just because of its sense of fragile identity. It is a superb piece of future-making and a film noir that bleeds over into tragedy.

David Thomson, Have You Seen…?

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