Blade Runner

 

The movie stars Harrison Ford as a cop who moves confidently through the city’s mean streets. He is laconic, cynical, competent. He has a difficult assignment. A group of “replicants,” artificial people who seem amazingly human, have escaped from “off-world,” and are trying to inflict themselves on Earth.
Ford’s job is to track them down and eliminate them. Anyone who has read this far can predict what happens next: He falls in love with one of the replicants. She may not be quite human, but, oh, you kid.
This basic story comes from a novel with the intriguing title, “Do Androids Dream of Electric Sheep?” The book examined the differences between humans and thinking machines, and circled warily around the question of memory: Does it make an android’s personal memories less valid if they are inspired by someone else’s experiences — especially if the android does not know that?
Ford says he originally signed on for “Blade Runner” because he found such questions intriguing. For director Ridly Scott, however the greater challenge seemed to be creating that future world. Scott is a master of production design, of imagining other worlds of the future (“Alien“) and the past (“The Duellists”).
The visual environments for this film are wonderful to behold, and there’s a sense of detail, too; we don’t just get the skyways and the monolithic skyscrapers and the sky-taxis, we also get notions about how restaurants, clothes and home furnishing will look in the future. “Blade Runner” is worth watching just to witness this artistry.
The obligatory love affair is pro forma, the villains are standard issue, and the climax is yet one more of those cliffhangers, with Ford dangling over an abyss by his fingertips. 
This movie from 1982 is stunning.  The questions surrounding robots and how we should treat them are now more profound in 2024 than ever before.  
I recommend seeing this movie if you haven't already.  And although few sequels are as good or better than the original, that is not the case with BladeRunner 2049, which I will review soon.