Blade Runner

Published in 1968,Philp K Dicks now famous 'Do Androids Dream of Electric sleep' broke from the tradition of usual sci-fi's.Like so many of Dick's novels instead of focusing on intergalactic wars and alien invasions,Dick's story would focus on a more personel story,a story about a man Rick Deckard and his quest to 'retire' several androids,on his mission he begins to empathise with the androids and starts to question; what is it to be human?

This sole question and idea combined with an exciting detective hunt for the androids would create the perfect enviroment for a film: Blade Runner
Filmed in 1981 and released in '82.
A moody,dystopian, film noir vision of the future with mile high skyscrapers. In an enviroment that always rained,at the bottom of towers in the basement of dark los angeles set to the dream-like score of vangelis and made with cutting edge visuals would make Blade Runner an unforgettable vision and an unfogettable film.
A vision that would spawn many imitators in film,videogames and literature.

The creation of Blade Runner was far from easy,confused test audiences convinced the studios to add on a bored voice over and a tacked on happy ending,effectively destroying the director,Ridley Scott's vision.
With the creation of the home video market and the release of a Directors cut in 1992 has made Blade Runner into one of cinemas most celebrated and seminal cult classics.

+ Google Video

On the Edge of Blade Runner

one of the better movies out there imo--- definitely one of the best sci-fi ever.--fascinating clip thanks :O

One of my all time favorites.

At the risk of expostulating, Blade Runner is on of the finest movies in cinema. I saw it when it first came out, then watched it once a day when it aired on SuperChannel.

Excellent, didn't catch that one on T.V. So deckard was a replicant after all...
Good to see Adama from Battlestar Galactica in an early role.

"He say you brade runnah!"

Originally Posted by Markas

So Deckard was a replicant after all...

That is a point i really dislike,and i wish he wasn't a replicant.
It is a more interesting story point for him to be human.A emotionless and hard nosed human who will kill any android without batting an eye lid but throughout the story learns compassion and learns to empathize with his artificial prey and regrets having to kill them.At the beginning of the film he has less emotion than the androids,i.e he is less human than the artifical beings, through the course of the story he becomes just as human as the ones he was sent to kill.
I suggest everyone to read the novel,that is the point the novel puts across.It is a flawed but a thought provoking book.

To make him be a replicant,just takes that mature theme away.
Philip K Dick thought of Deckard as a human,so in my mind i will always see Deckard as a human!

Originally Posted by MoralMan

That is a point i really dislike,and i wish he wasn't a replicant.
It is a more interesting story point for him to be human.I emotionless and hard nosed human who will kill any android without batting an eye lid but throughout the story learns compassion and learns to empathize with his artificial prey and regrets having to kill them.

To make him be a replicant,just takes that mature theme away.
Philip K Dick thought of Deckard as a human,so in my mind i will always see Deckard as a human!

Agreed his path to understanding the replicants almost makes him a replicant emotionally and distances him from his fellow man, which I always thought was the point of the movie- that replicants have more basic human emotions than humans in Deckard's time have.

best scene in that movie is at the end when rutger hauer has kicked deckards ass and pulls him back onto the roof holding that bird-- then he talks about things he has seen and dies -- my favorite scene very artsy fagsy but i loved it.

Originally Posted by Chaigidel

best scene in that movie is at the end when rutger hauer has kicked deckards ass and pulls him back onto the roof holding that bird-- then he talks about things he has seen and dies -- my favorite scene very artsy fagsy but i loved it.

Yes, with Vangelis diddling his keyboard in the background. Great ending, really emotional. I wish Hauer got more big hollywood breaks, he has commanding screne presence.
@MoralMan. Me too. The whole "Was Deckarad a Replicant" thing turns it into a cheap "Is Darth Luke's Father" rubbish bin. It's great the way Dick meant it to be.
Long live Dick...
...wait, he's dead, maybe it should have been Dick lived long
......There's to much Dick and long in this post for my liking, I think I'll shut up now.

The point about him turning out to be a replicant was that he was every bit as much a slave as the escaped-slaves he was hunting - that is the work of the cold mechanisation of society, subsuming and integrating human purposes and needs to fit parts of the great social machine. His very being was so totally at the command of the civilisation that created him, he didn't even realise he was being used, as all replicants are used - to perform hazardous tasks humans don't want to do - and the point was, well, HE might not have been human, but it really makes no difference, YOU the viewer might just as well be so enslaved. As we all are slaves of death also - the replicants' obsession with overcoming their mortality - their confrontation with their God who they slay (Tyrell) - their need to remember and record 'all those moments' with photographs and so on, to give it all meaning - it's all the same horrific life-struggle everyone faces. Blurring the boundaries between Deckard and the replicants makes perfectly clear the movie's statement - this is you, you are this badly ****ed, this is the human condition.

Blade Runner: The Director's Cut (not the stupid original with the missing scenes and the crass voiceover) is in my Top 5 favourite movies of all time, alongside High Noon, and Kill Bill.

Originally Posted by Cluny the Scourge

The point about him turning out to be a replicant was that he was every bit as much a slave as the escaped-slaves he was hunting - that is the work of the cold mechanisation of society, subsuming and integrating human purposes and needs to fit parts of the great social machine. His very being was so totally at the command of the civilisation that created him, he didn't even realise he was being used, as all replicants are used - to perform hazardous tasks humans don't want to do - and the point was, well, HE might not have been human, but it really makes no difference, YOU the viewer might just as well be so enslaved. As we all are slaves of death also - the replicants' obsession with overcoming their mortality - their confrontation with their God who they slay (Tyrell) - their need to remember and record 'all those moments' with photographs and so on, to give it all meaning - it's all the same horrific life-struggle everyone faces. Blurring the boundaries between Deckard and the replicants makes perfectly clear the movie's statement - this is you, you are this badly ****ed, this is the human condition.

Blade Runner: The Director's Cut (not the stupid original with the missing scenes and the crass voiceover) is in my Top 5 favourite movies of all time, alongside High Noon, and Kill Bill.

Quoted For Truth.

Especially that bit about the Director's Cut. I saw the 'Cut the first time I ever watched it, and got disgusted when a chanced upon the Theatrical Release on some TV station.

You should read 'I am alive and you are dead: a journey inside the mind of Philip K Dick' by Emmanuel Carrere.
It is the biography of PKD.Very compelling,PKD was quite utterly mad!
The most paranoid man in america,rumour has it he robbed his own house and then forgot about it,then blamed the authorities.
great guy.

Cluny,
Very interesting analysis,both viewpoints that he was either a replicant or human are very interesting.

.....ahh,this is why i did media studies,to talk about world class films that are thought provoking and raise great points on life and the universe...............we were meant to write on 2 sets of films,either: Bram Stokers Dracula(1992) some awful 50's version with Christopher lee and the orginal Dracula of 1932 or 'Clockwork orange','menace II society' and 'Stand By Me'.My idiotic teacher chose the dracula films.

Also,to move even more off-topic,the videogame Deus Ex reminds me of Blade Runner.

The video game 'Blade Runner' reminds me of Blade Runner too, for some eerie reason, though it's much older and was crap even when it was released.

The Blade Runner game was amazing...ish.
Great atmosphere and graphics(for the time) and actually a story far closer and faithful to the orginal novel than to the film.

Deckard was a replicant!! I really din't know I was tired and falling asleep at the end oh well that explains alot.