Ridley Scott’s Blade Runner opened in 1982 to a divided room. Some critics praised its thematic complexity and its visuals. Others found the pacing slow and the action thin. North American theaters mostly stayed away.
The film is set in a dystopian Los Angeles in 2019. Synthetic humans called replicants are bio-engineered by the Tyrell Corporation to work on space colonies. When a fugitive group of advanced replicants escapes back to Earth, former cop Rick Deckard is recalled to hunt them down. He is a blade runner, and his job is to terminate them.
Harrison Ford and the Deckard Problem
Casting the lead was trouble. Screenwriter Hampton Fancher wrote Deckard’s dialogue with Robert Mitchum in mind. Production documents list Gene Hackman, Sean Connery, Jack Nicholson, Paul Newman, Clint Eastwood, Tommy Lee Jones, Arnold Schwarzenegger, Peter Falk, Nick Nolte, Al Pacino and Burt Reynolds as actors considered for the part.
Scott and the producers spent months meeting Dustin Hoffman. Hoffman left over differences in vision. Harrison Ford got the role for several reasons, including his work in the Star Wars films, his interest in the story, and Steven Spielberg’s praise of his performance in Raiders of the Lost Ark, which Spielberg was finishing at the time. Ford wanted a role with dramatic depth.
That is the right instinct for this film. Deckard is not a hero. He is a man with a job he does not want, doing it badly, in a city that has stopped caring. Ford plays the weariness without asking for sympathy. The film never asks for it either.
Rutger Hauer as Roy Batty
Scott cast Rutger Hauer as Roy Batty without having met him, based on his performances in Paul Verhoeven’s films: Katie Tippel, Soldier of Orange and Turkish Delight. Philip K. Dick called Hauer’s Batty “the perfect Batty – cold, Aryan, flawless.”
Batty leads the escaped replicants. He is violent and thoughtful at once, which is the whole point of the character. Of all the films Hauer made, Blade Runner was his favorite. In a 2001 live chat he said: “Blade Runner needs no explanation. It just izz. All of the best. There is nothing like it. To be part of a real masterpiece which changed the world’s thinking. It’s awesome.”
That is a strange thing for an actor to say about his own film, and it is also correct. Hauer does not play Batty as a monster. He plays him as someone running out of time who knows it.
Sean Young, Edward James Olmos and the Supporting Cast
Blade Runner used a number of then-lesser-known actors. Sean Young plays Rachael, an experimental replicant implanted with the memories of Tyrell’s niece. Edward James Olmos plays Officer Gaff, who likes to make origami figures. M. Emmet Walsh is Bryant, Deckard’s former supervisor. Daryl Hannah is Pris, William Sanderson is Sebastian, Brion James is Leon, Joe Turkel is Tyrell, Joanna Cassidy is Zhora, James Hong is Chew, and Morgan Paull is Holden.
Gaff’s origami is the film’s quietest device. He folds paper while other people decide who lives. The film never explains him, and it does not need to.
The Voight-Kampff Test
Bryant recalls Deckard to the job. Four replicants are on Earth illegally. Deckard tries to leave. Bryant makes veiled threats, and Deckard stays.
The two watch a video of a blade runner named Holden administering the Voight-Kampff test. The test distinguishes replicants from humans based on their emotional responses to questions. The subject, Leon, shoots Holden on the second question.
Bryant wants Deckard to retire Leon and three other Nexus-6 replicants: Roy Batty, Zhora and Pris. Bryant sends Deckard to meet Eldon Tyrell, the CEO of the company that creates the replicants, so he can run the V-K test on a Nexus-6 and see whether it works.
Tyrell wants to see the test fail first. He asks Deckard to administer it to his assistant, Rachael. After a much longer than standard test, Deckard tells Tyrell privately that Rachael is a replicant who believes she is human. Tyrell says she is an experiment given false memories to provide an “emotional cushion,” and that she has no knowledge of her true nature.
Two Kinds of Test Subject
The film sets two tests side by side. One is a machine’s test for humanity. The other is what the replicants do to themselves.
| Voight-Kampff test | Rachael’s implanted memories | |
|---|---|---|
| Purpose | Distinguish replicant from human | Give a replicant an “emotional cushion” |
| Method | Emotional responses to questions | False memories of a human life |
| Administered by | Holden, then Deckard | Tyrell |
| Result | Leon shoots Holden on the second question | Rachael believes she is human |
Neither test holds. Leon answers with a gun. Rachael answers with a family photo, and Deckard tells her the memories are implants from Tyrell’s niece. She leaves in tears.
Searching Leon’s Room
Deckard searches Leon’s hotel room and finds photos and a scale from the skin of an animal. It is later identified as a synthetic snake scale. Roy and Leon, meanwhile, investigate a replicant eye.
This is the film’s method in miniature. Deckard works a case made of objects, and every object turns out to be manufactured. The snake scale is fake. The photos are fake. The memories are fake. The only thing in Los Angeles that is not manufactured is the rain.
The Score Under the Rain
Blade Runner underperformed in North American theaters. It polarized critics. Then it became a cult film, and it has since come to be regarded as one of the greatest science fiction films.
That reversal is not a mystery. Blade Runner is not built for a first viewing. It is built for a second one, when you stop waiting for the action and start looking at the production design, a high-tech but decaying future that the film is now famous for. It is often regarded as a leading example of neo-noir cinema and a foundational work of the cyberpunk genre. It has influenced science fiction films, video games, anime and television series. It also brought the work of Philip K. Dick to Hollywood’s attention and led to several film adaptations of his works. In 1993, it was selected for preservation.
Vangelis composed the soundtrack. It was nominated in 1982 for a BAFTA and a Golden Globe as best original score.
The score is the part that has aged best. It is not a soundtrack in the usual sense. It sits under the film like weather.
What the Tagline Gets Wrong
Blade Runner is a 1982 science fiction film directed by Ridley Scott from a screenplay by Hampton Fancher and David Peoples. It adapts the 1968 novel Do Androids Dream of Electric Sheep? by Philip K. Dick. It runs 118 minutes. Its genres are science fiction, drama and thriller. Its tagline is “Man has made his match …now it’s his problem.”
The tagline is the weakest thing about it. The film is not about a match. It is about what happens when the thing you made asks you a question you cannot answer, and you shoot it instead.
The film’s central claim, that a replicant who believes she is human is close enough to human to break your heart, is made once, quietly, and never argued. That is why it works. The middle sags. Some of the action is clumsy. But the parts people remember are not the fights. What stays is the rain, the origami, and Hauer’s last minutes, none of which the tagline could sell.
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