Blade Runner is a dark science fiction film directed by Ridley Scott released in 1982. It presents a bleak dystopic vision of Los Angeles in the not too distant future. Harrison Ford stars as "Blade Runner" Rick Deckard.

In the future world of the movie artificially manufactured androids called replicants are used for dangerous and degrading work in Earth's "offworld colonies". Replicants are considered dangerous and are illegal on Earth; Blade Runners are specialist police personnel who track down and "retire" (kill) escaped Replicants. Deckard is called out of his own retirement to "retire" several advanced "Nexus-6" replicants who are illegally present in Los Angeles.

Rutger Hauer and Darryl Hannah play two of the fugitive replicants, and Sean Young plays Rachael, Deckard's love interest, whose own humanity is in question.

Contents

1 Creators 2 Significance 3 Multiple versions 4 Related works 5 Blade Runner and today's issues 6 Blade Runner trivia 7 See also 8 External links

Creators

Based loosely on the novel Do Androids Dream of Electric Sheep? by Philip K. Dick, the original screenplay was written by Hampton Fancher which attracted the interest of Producer Michael Deeley . Deeley secured financing from the film from a range of sources (which later proved a problem) and secured the services of director Ridley Scott. Scott was not happy with the script and had David Peoples do a re-write. The soundtrack was composed by Vangelis.

The term "Blade Runner", used in this film as a designation for people of Deckard's profession, comes originally from a 1974 novel by Alan E. Nourse, The Bladerunner, the protagonist of which is a smuggler of black-market surgical implements. Nourse's book inspired William S. Burroughs's book, Bladerunner, A Movie , a script treatment in the form of a novel. Neither Nourse's novel nor Burroughs's had any influence on Ridley Scott's film Blade Runner except that Hampton Fancher happened upon a copy of Bladerunner, A Movie while Scott was looking for a snappier title for his film - Scott liked it, and obtained the rights to the title (but not any aspect of the plot). Some editions of Burroughs' book use the spelling Blade Runner.

Scott contracted Syd Mead who did most of the production design. Jim Burns also worked briefly on the project on the design of the Spinner flying cars. The Special Effects were supervised by Douglas Trumbull and Richard Yuricich .

Significance

Blade Runner operates on an unusually rich number of dramatic levels. The movie's dark cyberpunk style and futuristic design have inspired many subsequent science fiction movies, The Fifth Element and The Matrix for example. It also owes a large debt to film noir, containing such conventions as the femme fatale, a Chandleresque first-person narration (removed in later versions), and the questionable moral outlook of the Hero - extended here even to include the humanity of the hero, as well as the usual dark and shadowy cinematography. One of the key subtexts of the plot is to question the nature of reality, particularly with reference to Cartesian dreams which the human and android protagonists may or may not experience; it is therefore probably no coincidence that 'Deckard' is pronounced the same as 'Descartes'.

But it is also perhaps the most literate science fiction work of recent years, both thematically -- enfolding the philosophy of religion and moral implications of the increasing human mastery of genetic engineering, within the context of classical Greek drama and its notions of hubris -- and linguistically, drawing on the poetry of William Blake and the Bible. It also features a chess game based on the famous immortal game of 1851.

The film has been selected for preservation in the United States National Film Registry.

Multiple versions

Six versions of the film exist but only two are widely known and seen:

• The original theatrical release (1982), also called the domestic cut.
• Two workprint versions, shown only as previews to test audiences' response; one of these was distributed in 1991, billed as a Directors Cut, but was not approved by Ridley Scott. These workprints have occasionally been shown at film festivals.
• The Ridley Scott-approved Director's Cut in 1992, prompted by the unauthorized 1991 release. It does not include Deckard's explanatory voice-over. One scene was added: a dream Deckard has when he's dozing off at home drunk playing the piano. It shows a unicorn running through a forest. The final scene, where Deckard and Rachael are driving off into the wilderness, was removed from this edition. A couple of other scenes were extended slightly (mainly just city shots and flying scenes). This is the only version so far released on DVD.
• The international cut, with more graphic violence.
• The broadcast version, with some profanity removed.

Ridley Scott decided both the voice-over and the happy ending were not suited to the movie. The ending in the Director's Cut has to do with the following included scene: Deckard picks up a small origami unicorn he noticed on the ground when it was knocked over by Rachael as she was walking towards the elevator. This suggests Gaff knew about his dreams, insinuating that Deckard too has fabricated or copied memories, making him a replicant as well.

Scott ended much speculation on the issue by stating in a 2002 interview that Deckard is indeed a replicant (Harrison Ford, however, continues to insist that Deckard is not a replicant), although this raises a number of obvious questions. Despite this authorized opinion, some Blade Runner fans have various reasons to think the story is better if Deckard is not a replicant, mainly related to the strength of the conflict and some philosophical implications.

Making Deckard a replicant makes the film less interesting in a number of ways. If Deckard is human, the question of What it is to be human clearly becomes a central issue of the film. When Roy saves Deckard, a replicant is showing a behaviour so human that it makes the definition shake. When Deckard falls in love with Rachel, a human is feeling something for a non-human. If replicants are hunting and falling in love with replicants there is no ambivalence and therefore no conflict.

In 2002, Scott completed a new cut of the film - creating a new digital print of the film from the original negatives, updating the special effects, and remixing the score into 5.1 surround. Unlike the rushed 1992 Director's Cut, Scott personally oversaw the new cut. The Special Edition DVD is said to be a three-disc set including the original theatrical release, the 1992 director's cut, and the newly enhanced version, as well as deleted scenes, extensive cast and crew interviews, and a BBC documentary. Unfortunately, as of 2004, this "Special Edition" release has been delayed indefinitely due to legal disputes with the film's original bond guarantor s, who were ceded ownership of the film when the shooting ran over budget.

Related works

Three more Blade Runner novels, which are sequels to the movie rather than the book, have been written by Philip K. Dick's friend K. W. Jeter:

• Blade Runner 2: The Edge of Human (1988)
• Blade Runner 3: Replicant Night (1996)
• (2000)

There are also two computer games based on the movie. One for Commodore 64 and ZX Spectrum by CRL Group PLC year 1985 and one PC game (Westwood Studios, 1997), based on the world described by the film.

A good account of the film's history is available in the book by Paul Sammon (ISBN 0061053147).

Blade Runner and today's issues

The world of Blade Runner depicts a future whose fictional distance from present reality has grown sharply smaller during the past twenty years.

The first draft of the entire human genome was decoded in June 26 2000 by the Human Genome Project, followed by a steadily-increasing number of other organisms across the microscopic to macroscopic spectrum. The short step from theory to practice in using genetic knowledge was taken quickly: genetically modified organisms have become a present reality, with genetically-modified food ingredients an everyday part of human daily diet (at least, in North America).

The embryonic techniques of somatic cell nuclear transfer from a specific genotype via cloning, as well as some of the problems pre-figured in Blade Runner, were demonstrated by the cloning of Dolly the sheep in 1996. Since 2001, political efforts have been mounting in many countries to ban human cloning, impelled by a sense of its abhorrence and imminence, while rumors abound that the first human clones may already have been produced, the most famous example being a claim by the Raelians, a religious group who believes in extraterrestrials.

In all of these developments, a clear tension between commercial and non-commercial interests is apparent, as scientific and business motivations conflict with ethical and religious concerns about the appropriateness of human intervention in the deepest fabric of nature.

Such issues are deeply troubling to many. At core, the creation of life and the ordering of the natural world has been the traditional raison d'etre of gods, and the substance of various creation myths. In the classic Greek tradition, the term hubris denotes actions by humans that usurp roles properly reserved for the gods; heroes who display hubris invariably meet nasty ends (nemesis). Blade Runner has been praised for immersing us in these conflicts, successfully blurring any standard expectations of moral correctness.

Blade Runner trivia

• Bryant's reference to a sixth replicant is not Deckard but another replicant who was subsequently removed from the movie. Replacement dialogue was recorded for the scene but never used.
• In the novel, owls are the first species to become extinct in the deluge that creates Blade Runner world; in the movie, this is the reason for Deckard's line about Tyrell Corporation's owl: "It must be expensive".
• In the novel, the newest replicants are very difficult for the Voight-Kampf test to distinguish from humans, and the test has never been applied to a Nexus 6. In the movie, this is the reason for Deckard's line "And if the test doesn't work?"
• The final scene in the original theatrical cut was actually unused footage from Stanley Kubrick's The Shining.
• A panel at the Guardian http://www.guardian.co.uk/life/feature/story/0,13026,1290561,00.html voted Blade Runner the best science fiction movie ever.

See also

• List of movies
• List of actors
• List of directors
• List of documentaries
• List of Hollywood movie studios
• Bradbury Building - the interior location for the Sebastien the toymaker's flat.

External links

Wikiquote has a collection of quotations by or about Blade Runner

• Blade Runner entry http://www.imdb.com/title/tt0083658/ at the Internet Movie Database
• Blade Runner fan site http://www.brmovie.com/
  • Special Edition News Page http://www.brmovie.com/BR_Special_Edition.htm
  • Deckard Is Not A Replicant http://www.brmovie.com/Analysis/D-a-H_by_MC.htm , essay by Martin Connolly
• Petition: Special Edition DVD http://www.petitiononline.com/B26354/petition.html Petition to Release Special Edition DVD
• 2019: Off-World http://scribble.com/uwi/br/ , a fan site
  • "Was Deckard a replicant?" discussion at 2019: Off-World http://scribble.com/cgi-bin/colloquy/colloquy?br+search:deckard.*replicant