Blade Runner

People watch movies for many different reasons. Some people want to be immersed in a story, while some want to be immersed in a mood, a blend of light and shadow and music that transports you convincingly to another world. Some want to watch their favorite actors perform, and some pay attention to the technical details – the cinematography, the sets, the lighting, and all of the other things that make a movie work. It is rare that everyone has something to look for, but every now and then, a film comes along wherein all of the elements fall together in glorious unison, a sparkling cinematic gem so clearly superior to most movies that it belongs to a category of film all its own. Ridley Scott’s magnum opus Blade Runner is such a film. Twenty-five years after being underappreciated and having the rights bandied about by studios that hated it, the film has blossomed from a failure to a cult classic to a masterpiece that is finally getting its due praise.

Scott’s movie shines today as beautifully as it did when it was released. Aesthetically, it’s an incredibly appealing film. Long shots of police cars hovering over the streets of a dystopian Los Angeles, for all of their bleakness, have a profound, muted beauty accented perfectly by Vangelis’s moving score. Futurist Syd Mead provided a vision of the future for the film that refuses to look dated, coming from an era in which even the most classic films bear the marks of their era, and the film’s cinematography brings that vision to life perfectly.

The narrative itself is as thought-provoking as it is entertaining. On its surface,, it is a detective story, ableit one with sci-fi trappings. A group of genetically engineered humanoids called “Replicants” have escaped the off-world colonies where they were working and returned to Earth, where there presence is illegal. A detective named Deckard (Harrison Ford) who specializes in hunting down replicants is pulled out of retirement to track them down and destroy them. Deckard discovers that some of the replicants have been implanted with memories, in order to help them develop faster emotionally. As he finds himself falling in love with an unwitting Replicant, he begins to wonder what exactly it means to be human and if he is, in fact, human himself.

Actors such as Harrison Ford, M. Emmet Walsh, Edward James Olmos, and Rutger Hauer all give outstanding performances in a film that uses noir trappings to advance disturbing philosophical issues and the art of filmmaking itself, all at the same time.