Blade Runner

Science fiction set in Los Angeles in 2019. A corporation manufactures made people. They work in the colonies, are forbidden on Earth, and live four years. Four of them escape and come back. Deckard is assigned to find them. He had quit; he is called back and cannot refuse. From there the film is an investigation. A snake scale, a photograph, a maker of eyes, a nightclub and an apartment block. At the corporation he meets a woman. Rachael does not know she is not human and her memories were taken from someone else. What the narrative is interested in is not the hunt but duration: all the four want is to live longer, and the film shows them not as the hunted but as people about to die. Roy Batty speaks in the rain in the last scene. The lines were not in the script; a shortened version the actor wrote himself was used in the take. The design of the city permanently changed the genre. Constant rain, vast advertising screens, dark streets and smoky light settled into forty years of science fiction after it. The music is by Vangelis. There are several versions of the film. The first release carried a narration and a happy ending imposed by the studio; later cuts removed both, and that is the version measured against today. The source is a novel by Philip K. Dick, from which the film departs considerably. It failed at the box office on release. Harrison Ford, Rutger Hauer, Sean Young, Edward James Olmos and Daryl Hannah are in the cast. Ridley Scott directed. Who it is for: anyone watching for atmosphere and design. Who it is not for: anyone looking for pace; the film is slow, sparing with dialogue, and thin on plot.