Otto Penzler ranks, analyzes, & celebrates the 106 greatest crime films of all-time. Catch up on the series and find new installments daily here.
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Blade Runner (1982)
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TYPE OF FILM: Detective
STUDIO: Warner Brothers
EXECUTIVE PRODUCERS: Brian Kelly, Hampton Francher
PRODUCERS: Michael Delley, Ridley Scott
DIRECTOR: Ridley Scott
SCREENWRITERS: Hampton Francher and David Peoples
SOURCE: Do Androids Dream of Electric Sheep?, novel by Philip K. Dick
RUNNING TIME: 118 minutes
PRINCIPAL PLAYERS:
Harrison Ford…………………………………………………………………..…….Rick Deckard
Rutger Hauer…………………………………………………………………..…………Roy Batty
Sean Young…………………………………………………………………………………..Rachel
Edward James Olmos……………………………………………………………………….…Gaff
M. Emmet Walsh……………………………………………………………………Captain Bryant
Daryl Hannah……………………………………………………………………………………Pris
William Sanderson……………………………………………………………………J.F. Sebastian
Brion James……………………………………………………………………………………Leon
Joe Turkel………………………………………………………………………….Dr. Eldon Tyrell
Joanna Cassidy…………………………………………………………………………….…Zhora
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DID YOU KNOW?
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Although now regarded as a modern classic, both as a work of science fiction and as an old-fashioned noir private-eye film, complete with voice-over narration, Blade Runner was not an immediate success, costing $27,000,000 to make and earning only $14,000,000 on its initial release.
Critics, too, were tough on it, so much so that it was reedited more than once. In the original released version, Deckard and Rachel are reunited in his apartment, where he wonders how much time they will have together. The downbeat ending was changed for the second version, in which they head away from the filth of Los Angeles and drive into the country, where it seems they will have a better chance for happiness and a longer one, adding the notion that she did not have the usual four-year life span of other Replicants.
There was no voice-over in the first version. It was added to clarify some of the action in the rereleased second version, and it was eliminated from the director’s cut (made in 1991 to celebrate the tenth anniversary of the film).
Finally, the director’s cut placed greater emphasis on the romance between Deckard and Rachel and makes it more likely that Deckard, too, is a Replicant, which would be virtually impossible to comprehend from either of the first two versions, even with repeated viewing.
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THE STORY
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The Los Angeles of 2019 is a city of unrelenting rain and smog, with giant skyscrapers built on the ruins of what had once been there, populated by those who couldn’t afford to move off-planet to a better, brighter place.
Rick Deckard, a former cop, former Blade Runner (a member of a police department unit with a license to kill), and former killer, is pressed into service against his will when some Replicants (highly intelligent robots that look exactly like humans), outlawed from Earth ever since a colony staged an uprising against its human slavemasters, have sneaked back to the planet. It is his assignment to find them and kill them.
The Replicants have come back to Earth to find their creator, Dr. Eldon Tyrell, in order to have him change the self-destruct mechanism that is activated after a four-year life. Deckard visits Tyrell and falls in love with Rachel, his “daughter,” a special Replicant so advanced that no one has guessed that she is not human—not even herself, though she has begun to suspect it.
Deckard kills one of the Replicants, a woman, by shooting her in the back as she flees, and Leon, another of the superpowerful androids, nearly kills him, saying “Time to die.” Rachel shoots Leon, saving Deckard’s life.
The two surviving escaped Replicants—Roy Batty, the top-of-the-line leader with handsome features and exceptional physical abilities, and Pris, created as a prostitute—have managed to locate Dr. Tyrell. Batty kills him, crushing his skull, when he learns that the termination dates cannot be altered and that he and Pris have only a very short time to live.
Deckard catches up with the rebels at the once-beautiful Bradbury Building and, after a fight with the powerful Pris, shoots her. When Batty finds her, he tenderly kisses her dead mouth while Deckard attempts to ambush him, but with extraordinarily fast reflexes, Batty eludes the gunfire.
They engage in a long and violent cat-and-mouse game until Deckard is trapped, hanging from a ledge near the roof. Desperately holding on but ultimately unable to save himself, his grip loosens and he begins to plunge to his death, when Batty grabs him and saves his life.
Deckard, puzzled at first, surmises that, at the very end, Batty saved his life just before he himself ran out of time and died, because “maybe in those last moments he loved life more than he ever had before. Not just his life, anybody’s life, my life.”
Deckard returns to his apartment to find Rachel asleep. As a Replicant and therefore illegal on Earth, she is supposed to be killed, but he leaves Los Angeles with her. As a special Replicant, the pet project of Dr. Tyrell, it is possible that she was not made with a termination date. “I didn’t know how long we had together,” Deckard muses. “Who does?”
***
When Deckard is hired, he is told that six Replicants, three male and there female, escaped and made it to Earth. One male was “fried” at the “electronic gate” at the Tyrell Corporation building; we never see this one. Zhora, the snake dancer, is killed by Deckard (that’s two). Leon is shot and killed by Rachel (number three). Pris and Batty (four and five) die in the final confrontation with Deckard. The sixth rebel is never seen or mentioned again. However, Rachel is also a Replicant, though she was not one of the criminal Replicants being hunted and, indeed, was not known to be a Replicant by the police or Deckard until he did some tests at the behest of Dr. Tyrell, who tried to fool Deckard into thinking she was human.
The inability to count was not the only goof in the making of Blade Runner. The sheet music that Rachel apparently reads while playing the piano is for a different piece of music. Batty’s shoes are blue when he climbs through the window in the final scene, yet they are black when he is on the roof. Earlier in the same scene, Batty clenches his hand and a nail can be seen to have been driven through it—an event that does not occur until later.
The original choice to pay Rick Deckard was (yes, this is true) Dustin Hoffman.
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BEST LINE
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Rick Deckard has just ordered lunch—some raw fish over noodles—at an outdoor bar, and reminisces to himself, “Sushi, that’s what my ex-wife called me. Cold fish.”
