Ridley Scott's Los Angeles, 2019. A commercial disappointment in 1982 that has become the foundational text of modern science-fiction visual design.
Los Angeles, November 2019. Rick Deckard, a retired police 'blade runner' specialising in tracking down and killing fugitive androids ('replicants'), is reactivated to hunt down four Nexus-6 replicants who have escaped an off-world colony and returned to Earth. The replicants — led by Roy Batty — are searching for their creator, Eldon Tyrell of the Tyrell Corporation, in hopes of extending their built-in four-year lifespan.
The film tracks Deckard's pursuit across roughly one week. He kills two of the four replicants. He falls in love with Rachael, a replicant who does not know she is one. The film's climactic confrontation between Deckard and Roy Batty, on the rain-soaked roof of an abandoned building, ends with Batty saving Deckard's life moments before his own lifespan expires. Batty's final monologue ('I've seen things you people wouldn't believe...') is one of the most-quoted sequences in modern cinema.
Blade Runner is the film almost every subsequent science-fiction production has been visually arguing with. The neon-and-rain Los Angeles of 2019. The vertically-stacked apartment slums. The pyramid Tyrell headquarters. The flying car-traffic at multiple altitudes. The corporate-Asian-fusion signage. The aesthetic is now so culturally ingrained that it's hard to remember it was a deliberate construction by Scott, designer Syd Mead, and DP Jordan Cronenweth.
Almost every major science-fiction film since 1982 is in some sense a Blade Runner. The Fifth Element. Ghost in the Shell. The Matrix. Minority Report. Children of Men. Her. Ex Machina. Blade Runner 2049. Dune: Part Two. All of them visually draw on Blade Runner's establishing template. Scott's $28m budget bought one of the most-influential visual statements in the history of mainstream cinema.
Blade Runner exists in at least seven distinct cuts. The 1982 theatrical cut (with Harrison Ford's voiceover and a happy ending tacked on at studio insistence). The Workprint (an early test cut). The International Cut (slightly more violent for non-US markets). The U.S. Broadcast Cut. The Director's Cut (1992, removed the voiceover and the happy ending). The Final Cut (2007, Ridley Scott's preferred version, with restored footage and digital cleanup).
Most contemporary critical writing about the film refers to the Final Cut. The version on most streaming services is the Final Cut. If you've heard about the film and want to watch it for the first time, watch the Final Cut. The theatrical 1982 cut is, on Scott's own assessment, a worse film than the version he wanted to make.
The famous 'Tears in Rain' monologue, delivered by Rutger Hauer as Roy Batty in his final moments, was largely improvised by Hauer on set. The original screenplay had a longer, more-mythological speech. Hauer condensed it into the version that ended up on screen: 'I've seen things you people wouldn't believe. Attack ships on fire off the shoulder of Orion. I watched C-beams glitter in the dark near the Tannhäuser Gate. All those moments will be lost in time, like tears in rain. Time to die.'
The monologue is, by survey of working screenwriters, among the most-quoted pieces of film dialogue ever written (or improvised). Its argument — that the replicant Batty has experienced specific, valuable, irreproducible things, and that his death will end those experiences — is the film's emotional culmination. The film's question about what makes someone human is, in the monologue, answered: the things that make Batty human are the things that no human will ever see, and they will die with him.