Ridley Scott's Blade Runner, for me, is the be all and end all of science-fiction pictures. Adapted from Phillip K. Dick's 1968 novel Do Androids Dream of Electric Sheep?, Blade Runner's history is one of a legendarily troubled shoot, and egregious financial disappointment. However, like some other films that experienced such stressful and humble beginnings and ultimately grew in importance and popularity with each passing decade (like Citizen Kane, The Shawshank Redemption, The Wizard of Oz and It's a Wonderful Life), Blade Runner's esteem now with film critics and audiences alike shows that in 1982 it was simply a movie that was decades ahead of its time.
Blade Runner is as visually awe-inspiring a movie as you will ever see. Justifiably celebrated for its mesmerizing production design, Scott and his crew, also putting to work visual effects that don't show 34 years (with or without remastering for the Director's Cut and Final Cut - my recommendation - in 1991 and 2007 respectively), paint a wrenching but no less aesthetically pleasing portrait of what maybe 2019 Los Angeles will look like: dystopic, polluted and brimming with corruption and corporate greed. You could only hope to see such amazing eye-candy from a director who is arguably one of the last true visionary directors (that now being a term which, it seems, is thrown around nearly as much these days in Hollywood circles as "You'll never work in this town again!").
But therein does not lie that magic ingredient that makes Blade Runner the seminal masterpiece of science-fiction film-making – that is in two other aspects of the story. The first of those is its ocean-deep and universal themes. Blade Runner is a movie that challenges the viewer to ponder not only what it means to be human, but why we are human. Through the central characters of Deckard (the central male whom we know more about than he knows of himself), played by Harrison Ford, Rachael (the female replicant and love interest of Deckard's who is the most advanced of her kind but still knows only mortality), played by Sean Young, and Roy Batty (the revengeful replicant who wages war on both Deckard and his own maker), played by Rutger Hauer (who even wrote Roy's famous climactic monologue himself), Blade Runner is a timeless, universal and marvelous analysis and deconstruction of the human condition in all its dimensions. And the characterizations by Ford, Young and most notably Hauer all leave indelible impressions.
Also broadening the narrative scope of the film is the mind-boggling fusion of postmodern cyberpunk and future neo-noir. This adds yet another layer of beauty and intrigue, especially in Vangelis' instantly recognizable score and with the cynical and introverted Deckard feeling much like a role Humphrey Bogart might have accepted.
The second definitive sign of Blade Runner's colossal greatness lies in its cautionary tale view of the future – and in 2016, unlike 1982, we all know how alarming the possibility of it successfully predicting the future is. After all, 2019 is just three years away. Pollution, slavery, prostitution, global warming, corruption. Technological enslavement? Think about that the next time you buy a piece of audiovisual equipment or even the next time you fire up your computer. Good sci-fi always tries to predict the future. Only the very best get it right.
In summary, you can throw 2001: A Space Odyssey or Metropolis or even The Matrix at me, but in my book, with its ageless eye-candy, its questions about life and human nature, and its gritty yet all-too-possible prediction of the future, Blade Runner is the definitive science-fiction movie of all time.
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