IMDb #134 Review: Blade Runner (1982)

Source: Wikipedia

Robots that look like people are bad fucking news in pretty much any fictional venue, and this is no exception.

In this universe, the androids have a built-in four-year lifespan. Any that run away from their awful jobs to enjoy their short lives are hunted down. The hunters are inexplicably entitled "Blade Runners."

I suspect the glum storyline exists as an afterthought to showcase the glorious cyberpunk universe. LA, 2019, has somehow become a flashy advertisement-saturated megalopolis with heavy Japanese overtones. It's always night, and it rains constantly (despite, you know, California).

The corrupt megacorporations conscript the hero, a "retired" Blade Runner, from sitting at a ramen stand to the front lines.

Thus our reluctant hero mopes through the drippy dilapidated dystopia in search of rogue robots.

He uses a test, a series of questions, to determine a test subject's humanity, whether the subject's memories are legitimate or implanted. Like the Turing test, except semi-reliable.

The hero behaves robotically, even for Harrison Ford. (Go on, look up "Deckard is a replicant" and spend entire seconds skimming through whackjob theories that make more sense than the movie).

The sloth-paced chase goes from a soaring corporate ziggurat to abandoned apartments to grimy streets to sketchy post-human strip clubs to the unintentionally disturbing animatronic-packed domicile of an unrepentant freak.

The whole constructed world feels fantastic. But the story. It drags, slow and grim, through the mud and blood and guts and robot tits, and shoves your face in the question of what it means to be human. Sorry, 1982, let you know when we figure that out.

Is the eloquent platinum-blonde Olympian justified in his philosophical ramblings? Can machines feel emotions? Why are there 1980s computer graphics in the future?

Questions without answers. None of it will matter when your toaster becomes self-aware and nukes the planet to oblivion.

116 minutes.