‘I’ve, seen things you people wouldn’t believe…’, and so said Rutger Hauer at the end of what quite possibly might be my favourite film of all time.

Released in a slightly bastardised, studio friendly form in 1982 Blade Runner nigh on instantly flopped, only resurfacing a few years later as a cult-classic (a phrase I hate), whereupon it was proclaimed a modern masterpiece (and that one) by the people who proclaim these things. Subsequently it’s been released in a DVD box set that features about thirty six diffrerent cuts.

Harrison Ford plays retired detective Rick Deckard, the Blade Runner of the title, who’s job it is to track down and kill (or ‘retire’ as the film would euphemistically have it) rogue robots who return to Earth.

After being dragged out of retirement, he’s assigned the job of ‘retiring’ a few ‘skin jobs’ that have strayed back onto Earth it’s business as usual, until that is he meets Rachel.

Rachel, a very advanced replicant, so advanced she doesn’t even realise she’s a replicant, works for The Tyrell Corporation. She meets Deckard when he’s sent there to make sure the test they use to identify replicants, the so called Voight-Kampff test, works on the newer Nexus-6 models.

So they meet, he realises she’s not human and the story begins.

Set in 2019, Blade Runner portrays the kind of dystopic future we don’t see any more, it manages to convince us that we’re looking at an Earth that everyone’s abandoned, an Earth with no people of value left on it, an Earth devoid of its soul, an Earth that stands as a metaphor for the robots the story is about.

It’s the emptiness that defines the film’s style. Although set in the future it’s a future that’s stalled, when everyone took off the investment stopped, the future is elsewhere, the future is in the off world colonies. With the people.

So with no requirement to show how cool the future is, or in fact how many people are in it, the film gets to concentrate on telling the story at hand without needing to show sweeping vistas of technology soaked silver and white citadels.

And that story is a love story, the story of a group of children adrift on an island with no one to love them. Two groups of children. The ones that know they’re going to die and the ones that don’t, eventually those that know, die, and those that didn’t know, realise.

The arguments about whether or not Deckard is a replicant are irrelevant, he is. Whether or not he is truly ‘in love’ with Rachel or not is the biggy, and something we will never know. I have always thought that quite a few of the characters in Blade Runner could be robots, none of them is particularly human.

Gaff is a very interesting character though, his in depth knowledge of the thoughts that sit inside Deckard’s head, reveal that he is somehow in on the whole replicant thing, but why? For what purpose have they got Deckard to do the dirty work of getting rid of these robots if, at every turn, Gaff is in the background lurking?

Would this be common practice? Would they always use robots under the supervision of a real policeman to hunt down the other robots. It would make sense, set a thief to catch a thief and all that, but why if that were the case would they let Deckard escape with Rachel?

Having said that, we never see a happy-ever-after, so for all I know this could be a cyclical event. Replicants come back to Earth, Rachel and Deckard are dusted off, charged up and left to get on with it. Deckard to do the killing and Rachel to give him his reason to kill.

The fact that retirement is a running euphemism for being killed, it’s interesting to point out that Deckard was himself at the beginning of the movie retired, from Blade Running at least. If we were to use the language of the film, it could be taken to mean that prior to Deckard’s meeting with Gaff he was in fact dead, or at least not alive, and was in fact only switched on just before Gaff picked him up.

Who knows. All I know is that it’s a fantastically complex film that allows for many unique interpretations. The fact that it’s 25 years old is bewildering, it’s as fresh today as it ever was.

Quite simply it’s the best film ever made.

Filed under: Cool, Movies