Facts
Title: Blade Runner
Director: Ridley Scott
Writing credits: Philip K. Dick, Hampton Fancher
Year of release: 1982
Blade Runner is a cyberpunk film directed by Ridley Scott. It gave cyberpunk science fiction its visual representation, and has so become "the definitive cyberpunk movie".
The movie is based on Philip K. Dick's book "Do Androids Dream of Electric Sheep". The movie script can be found here.
Blade Runner is not a traditional sci-fi movie, it's a touching drama about the value of life and the importance of making the most of what you've got. One of the most important themes in the film is the question of what is more valuable - humans without emotions, or machines with? The film gives no answer - it just opens our eyes and makes us aware that we should be grateful for being alive.
Synopsis
Los Angeles, 2019: Rick Deckard is a blade runner, a police man of the future who hunts down and terminates replicants, artificially created humans. Replicants were used to serve in the colonies outside Earth but with fixed lifespans. They were declared illegal after a bloody mutiny on an Off-World Colony, and are to be terminated upon detection. Man's obsession with creating a being equal to himself has back-fired.
Deckard wants to get out of the force, but is drawn back in when 5 "skin jobs", a slang term for replicants, hijack a ship back to Earth. The city that Deckard must search for his prey is a huge, sprawling, bleak vision of the future. This film questions what it is to be human, and why life is so precious.
