Note: Okay so it may not be remarkably "current" placing a review of a 1982 film on here, but I felt like writing this for my Blogspot so I thought hell, why not put up it here too?! I'm also acutely aware that I'm vomiting out my rather amateurish opinion on a site run and frequented by movie-nuts, most of whom will know a great deal more than me on the subject. But for what's it's worth, here's my two peanuts:

Watching Blade Runner is more of an experience than a pleasure. You know you're watching something of great significance. A piece of history and a classic work of science fiction. But somehow you just can't shake the feeling of being a little bewildered as to what exactly is going on. 

The film takes place in a dystopian near future (though you wouldn't think it to look at all the flying cars and miles-highskyscrapers) in which the powerful Tyrell Corporation has created a breed of androids, called replicants, which it uses as slave labour in off-world colonies (it is the near future remember). For security reasons replicants are banned from coming to Earth and have short four year lifespans. Our main protagonist is an ex-cop, Deckard (Harrison Ford), who is brought out of retirement to take on a case of five such replicants who have escaped their surly bonds and are running lose on Earth. What they looking for? Answers. Answers about the nature of their existence.

It scarcely needs to be said what a virtuosic job Ridly Scott - who was fresh off the set of Alien - does with this piece as well as the production, art and cinematography departments. For all this is plain to see on-screen and is the reason why Blade Runner is so iconic in its genre. The futuristic city looks spectacular to this day, both at street level and from above, and is undoubtedly the star of the film.  Not since Fritz Lang's Metropolis has such an ambitious vision of the future been captured on film, and it has been the template for science fiction dystopias ever since; its influence being most conspicuous in films like Brazil, DarkCity and The Fifth Element. 

What is not so fantastic about Blade Runner is the script which suffers from some of the worst exposition I have ever seen in cinema. There is a whole twenty minutes of movie which, for the life of me, I cannot make any sense of, despite having seen it four times now. It begins when Deckard is tracking down his first replicant. Not that you would know that of course, because the film simply cuts to Deckard and another officer at a cramped and dingy apartment where he picks what looks like a small, tear-drop shaped piece of plastic from a bath tub, examines it and then places it carefully in a protective bag as evidence. Evidence of what exactly? And what lead him to this apartment? How does it fit into the context of their investigation? Is it a crime scene? Is it the previous residence of a replicant? What drew his attention to the bath? What drew him to, of all things, this unremarkable looking piece of plastic? Who knows. For none of this is explained to viewer. And unfortunately these are questions that need answers if the subsequent fifteen minutes is be anything other than a baffling display of pretty colours and flashing lights.

The original release of the film had narration from Harrison Ford, which served to explain what was going on throughout the course of movie, including the scene I just described. This was subsequently removed with the Final Cut, as it was deemed unnecessary. Hmm…

[Edit: I have since read this part of the script, with the original narration in place. The scene can be made sense of even without it, but it's about as clear as a glass of muddy puddle water]

There are moments of dialogue too that seem to make absolutely no sense. Consider a scene in which two of the replicants, who are pretending to be human, pay a visit to Sebastian, a genetic engineer who works for Tyrell Corporation. Sebastian, who designed the brains of the replicants, suspects their true identity and what follows is a dialogue exchange which seems to have no connection to sentient thought or reality whatsoever:

[Pris throws hot egg at Sebastian]

The film is also meant to make us think about what it means to be human. I think it is fair to say that here too the film is weak. We are told at the beginning, in form a text dump, that replicants are made to be “at least as intelligent as their human counterparts”. We also learn early on that they are capable of developing their own emotional responses. This creates a situation whereby the only meaningful difference between a replicant and a human being is the manner in which they are conceived. This is hardly a challenge to our conceptions of humanity, as one does not need to be a philosophy major to appreciate that what makes us special is not our fleshy ape ancestry, or our even fleshier exit through the birth canal, but our ability to contemplate our own existence. Something Blade Runner’s replicants essentially spend the entire film doing.

For all its faults though Blade Runner is a magnificent, if rather frustrating experience. Aside from the occasional lapse where you may find yourself lost as to what’s going on, it’s a compelling visual experience that manages to combine science fiction and film-noir in way that has yet to be equalled, much less surpassed. The final scene of Deckard’s showdown with Roy is also one the most memorable in movie history. You may not love it, but it is a film I would urge everyone to see.