Blade Runner (1982)
Visions of the future, past, and present
It is 2019 in Los Angeles, according to the vision of the future in this 1980s film. Not a cell phone in sight, just people living in the moment gunning down replicants and growing robot eyes in a vat and talking about the price of artificial snakes.
The tale of a former cop tasked with finding and killing four fugitive, sentient, human-like robots — with the possibility that he might be one of these “replicants” himself — Blade Runner (1982) was directed by Ridley Scott and based on the Philip K. Dick novel, Do Androids Dream of Electric Sheep.
Blade Runner is really memorable for its production design, its Vangelis soundtrack, and its interesting vision of the future as seen from 1982. Since nobody knows what the actual future is going to look like, futuristic films tend to look like exaggerations of the existing time period — see the bright colors and skateboards and wild hair from “2015” in 1989’s Back to the Future II. In contrast to the previous example, Blade Runner shows a dark, dingy, overcrowded, and rather clunky vision of the 1980s. And maybe there’s some of the Brutalist architecture inspiration from the original novel’s 1960s time period thrown in. The Tyrell Corporation, a looming force in this dystopian world, is headquartered in a giant ugly pyramid that dominates the Los Angeles skyline. Bright advertisements are everywhere, and Japanese electronics companies appear to be a major part of the economy — again, this was a reflection of the 1980s. A time period of big shoulder pads, big hair, and big gadgets — technology was more analog and more physical and took more space overall compared to actual 2019 with sleek little smart phones compressing tons of computing power in your pocket.
Another unique aspect of this movie’s visual design is the 1940s noir era inspiration. There’s already a lot to overlap with the 1980s aesthetic — again with the big shoulder pads, big hair, tons of bright neon lights at night like a seedy version of Times Square.
Harrison Ford stars as Rick Deckard, our neo-noir hard-boiled detective type. More specifically, he is a former cop who is coerced by Gaff (Edward James Olmos) and Bryant (M. Emmet Walsh) into a new task: to track down and kill four “replicant” targets.
According to the intro text, the replicants — extremely advanced robots who look identical to humans and have normal flesh-and-blood bodies — are the product of the Tyrell corporation. They have better physical strength and agility than humans, and equal or higher intelligence. In this dystopian future, they were used as slave labor in off-world colonies. Whoever thought this was a good idea never read or watched any sci-fi novels or films ever, and were surprised when some Nexus 6 replicants rebelled and fought back. Because of this incident, replicants are illegal on earth with orders for “Blade Runner” police squads to shoot and kill them on sight. Except these violent executions are euphemistically called “retirement.”
One possible way to look at this movie is predicting how future technology might shape future moral and ethical issues. Back in 1982, robotics existed but artificial intelligence as we now know it was years away from being invented. It was big news in the late 1990s when Deep Blue outmatched human chess champion Garry Kasparov, Roomba became a commercial hit in the early 2000s, and chatbots and image generation didn’t take off for the general public until this current decade. Artificial General Intelligence or “true A.I.”, depicted in the sentient replicants of Blade Runner, has not yet been achieved to the public’s knowledge as of this writing — if it ever will. Yet even now, one can find news and culture articles of people practicing abusive behavior on chatbots.
Genetic engineering and cloning, too, have also advanced beyond the time period when the movie was released. According to the U.S. Food and Drug Administration, 1982 was the year the first consumer GMO product was approved: human insulin to treat diabetes. But it wasn’t until 1996 that Dolly the sheep was cloned. Human cloning — which is not known to have gone beyond the embryo stage — is restricted or outright banned in many jurisdictions around the world. The idea is controversial because people don’t want to create a dystopia in real life.
However, in a greater sense, the point of movies like Blade Runner tends to be about universal and established phenomena: man’s inhumanity to man. In fact, in the theatrical version of the film which includes Deckard’s voiceover narration, Bryant is described as the kind of cop who would have been racist before replicants became a new scapegoat and out-group. The movie emphasizes that the replicants aren’t just simple robots or “computers” — they do have physical bodies. In the world of Blade Runner, humans are happy to extract hard labor from the replicants, make them fight wars, and use them for sexual gratification — but not to allow them self-determination. This has been a running theme of humanity’s past and present, whether in a systemic group level or on an individual abuse level — any time when people have enslaved or exploited other people, treated them as second-class citizens, treated them like objects, or otherwise dehumanized them.
Replicants in Blade Runner are marked apart from humans by their apparent lack of normal empathy, as shown by failing the Voight-Kampff test of expressing emotions in the expected way. This alleged lack of empathy, ironically, becomes an excuse for humans to withhold empathy from them.
Eldon Tyrell (Joe Turkel), the CEO of the Tyrell Corporation, gives a demonstration of the Voight-Kampff test with his assistant Rachael (Sean Young), who makes quite an impression on Deckard. Rachael is a more sophisticated type of replicant who acts normal enough to nearly pass the test, and who has had false memories implanted to make her believe she is a real human. She doesn’t realize her lifespan is limited — replicants are given only four years before their genetically engineered bodies abruptly shut down. But the other renegade replicants are very much aware of this, and want to change their fate...
Plot specifics — here be spoilers
Rachael goes to Deckard, learning from him that her entire life was a lie and she really is an artificial replicant. She keeps poised and tries to hold herself together, but her devastation shows through and you can’t help but feel bad for her. Deckard struggles to show sensitivity, but he does want to be helpful.
Deckard, being the protagonist, is the character you relate to and root for at first. He has a job to do, and a dangerous one. His investigation leads him to a female replicant Zhora (Joanna Cassidy), working as an exotic dancer with a snake motif. Figuring out that Deckard intends to kill her, Zhora attacks him first but is forced to flee. Deckard pursues the unarmed woman and shoots her in the back, with wounds on her shoulder blades looking like cut angel wings, as she falls and dies among a bunch of storefront mannequins — executed for wanting to be more than an artificial mannequin. Zhora was not the bad guy — she was not out to hurt or kill anyone, just minding her own business, only attacking in self-defense, and fleeing unarmed at the time she was killed with no apparent interest in getting back at Deckard.
Deckard, meanwhile, doesn’t experience this as a triumph. Rather than a hero, he realizes he is basically the villain of a slasher movie.
But he continues the investigation, if nothing else for his own survival as the other three replicants aren’t going to wait for him to attack first. Leon (Brion James), a male replicant who had already critically injured a cop, goes after Deckard — and it is Rachael who saves him by killing Leon herself.
The remaining two replicants, Roy Batty (Rutger Hauer) and Pris (Daryl Hannah), have a plan. Pris pretends to be a lost waif, drawing the attention of Sebastian (William Sanderson), an eccentric Tyrell Corporation genetic designer who decorates his dusty apartment with animatronic toys he built himself. Sebastian is easy to manipulate, desperate for love or at least friendship. Roy uses him to get to Eldon Tyrell, who has been playing god the whole time, in hopes of getting a longer lifespan. When Tyrell says that is not possible, Roy murders him in a really gruesome scene, and it’s implied that he kills Sebastian offscreen too.
Tyrell’s death scene is a cautionary tale. Up until it’s too late for him to escape Roy’s vice grip on his face, it doesn’t seem to occur to him that Roy could be a danger to him. He admires, maybe even idolizes, the work of his own hands and he doesn’t stop to think that making a more powerful being in his own image could backfire.
Meanwhile, Deckard and Rachael fall in love and Deckard learns Rachael has been added to his list of targets, now that she has defected from Tyrell Corporation. He is definitely not going to follow that order.
But before fleeing the city with Rachael, Deckard goes to investigate Sebastian’s apartment where he gets in a confrontation with Pris and kills her. Roy Batty catches up to him and is more than a match for Deckard, but after a prolonged brutal fight scene, Roy’s preset life span is coincidentally over and he ends up saving Deckard at the last moment. It’s not because he suddenly decided to be nice to the guy who just shot his girlfriend a few minutes ago. It’s because he wants someone around to hear his story. Before shutting down, Roy gives his “tears in rain” monologue reminiscing about his earlier days off-world. With life extension not being possible, he decides the next best thing for him is for someone else to listen to him and keep his memory alive. Tying in with Rachael learning she was a replicant all along and that her memories were false, it is a recurring theme in the movie that memories are part of how people form their sense of self.
Knowing Rachael doesn’t have much time left either, Deckard returns to his apartment and is relieved to find her tired but alive. They flee the city together, but first Deckard notices the origami unicorn by Gaff, which in at least one cut of the movie is a callback to one of Deckard’s daydreams of a unicorn. If Gaff knows what’s on Deckard’s mind the way that Deckard was informed of Rachael’s memories, it is a hint that Deckard could be some sort of replicant himself — but the movie doesn’t confirm anything either way.
I liked that Deckard’s true nature was left ambiguous. The point isn’t whether he was a normal human or a replicant; the point is that he found a common connection and empathy with the replicants regardless of whether he was one of them or not. And also — as the movie emphasizes — even if he is a normal human, it’s not like he is guaranteed a long life either, and he and Rachael will have to make the best of whatever time left they have together.