Review of Blade Runner (1982) by Halfwelshman — 11 Aug 2012

It's the big ideas behind its iconic visuals that really makes Blade Runner such a great science-fiction film. Covering wide-ranging themes including what it means to be human, free will, future off-world colonisation, the meaning of dreams and the nature of reality, it's certainly a cerebral viewing experience.

Ridley Scott is a master of genre-crossing - Alien was a hybrid of science-fiction and several sub-genres of horror, and Blade Runner is a science-fiction-noir. You've got the iconography and narrative structure of dark detective fiction encased in a radical, industrialised future city that appears as a strangely organic fusion of Eastern and Western culture.

Though he reportedly had a bad time shooting the film, Harrison Ford gives one of the standout performances of his career as Rick Deckard, a weary hard-boiled detective who looks as though he's stepped straight out of a pulp detective novel.

Daryl Hannah's impish and sinister take on a female fugitive android impresses as well, as does Edward James Olmos's mysterious mostly-silent detective Gaff - he doesn't say much, but his actions speak louder than words ever could.

However, it's Rutger Hauer who really steals the show as Roy, the unhinged leader of the renegade "replicants" who Deckard is hunting, his performance a pitch-perfect deliverance of creepy-cool, and he gives one of the best farewell monologues on film (Haur responsible for choosing the most affecting parts of a speech written by David Webb Peoples) where Roy professes his humanity in moving, poetic verse as rain cascades down his grieving face.

Vangellis' eerie, layered electronic score also helps no end to add further richness and emotion to the film. I'm not quite sure why there's still a debate about the implications of the film's final scene - it's pretty obvious what Scott intended.

Blade Runner is undeniably one of the most influential of science-fiction films, and is an interesting modern take on a film noir to boot. I can't really say that I think Blade Runner is better that Scott's previous foray into sci-fi - yes there's another shadowy, amoral super-corporation pulling strings behind the scenes, but beyond that, Alien is just too different to compare.

I sincerely hope Scott stops plundering his back-catalogue of successes at some point and moves onto something new, what with Prometheus being such a mixed bag of a film. There's a Prometheus sequel and another film in the Blade Runner universe in the works, which is more than a little worrying, and makes me wonder whether we should forcibly remove Ridley Scott's science-fiction crown before he really embarrasses himself.