Synopsis:

Los Angeles, 2019: Rick Deckard (Harrison Ford) of the LAPD's Blade Runner unit prowls the steel & micro-chip jungle of the 21st century for assumed humanoids known as 'replicants'. Replicants 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.

Brian's Rating: B : I am supposed to like this movie a lot.  At least that is what I read. It is supposed to be right up my alley. It is a cult-classic.  I saw the movie on VHS back in 1990 or so, and I recently watched it again under the false impression that I was watching the Directors Cut, more on that in a minute.

I do not know why, but cyberpunk novels or movies have never really yanked my chain.   In Blade Runner, sure, Harrison Ford is a good actor.  The setting is cool and imaginative, and it has lots of cool tech.  Its interesting to see the 1982 perspective on 2019.  They nailed concepts like large digital billboards, but still have CRT monitors in the home, or office.  Of course, everything in the future has anti-grav technology, so there are floating cars and such.  However, the movie is slow moving.  There are supposed to be rich themes involved, and sure, if you think about it, you can find the themes of humanity vs. machine (being duplicated right now in  the immensely popular BSG), and begs the question, what makes a human, a human?  At its most basic element this  is a theme on the spiritual nature of man.  These themes are there, but they do not pop right out at you.  You kind of have to dig for them, and not unlike poetry, I always feel cheated when I have to construct a fragile bridge to a certain message from the original content.

More on the movie:  Man creates robot, robot (called replicant) becomes lifelike, robot gets tired of being a slave and revolts.   Replicants are then banned from earth, and a special breed of cop, called a Blade Runner is invented to hunt them down like wild dogs.  The euphemism of retirement is used for these executions.  Rick Deckard (Harrison Ford) is one such Blade Runner, and he spends the movie hunting down 4 of them.

The final scene with the head replicant, Roy Batty, is a powerful one.  I imagine this is why the movie obtained cult status.  It is also the reason I raised my rating from a B- to a B.  Aside from that, there are some shortcomings of the film.  I do not like narrative voice overs, and they are used liberally.  Dialog is lacking, and character motivation is hard to follow.  Special effects were bound by the limitation of 1980, and just do not stack up to the potential this film could have today with the visual CGI they can do now.

Back to the Directors Cut.  Netflix screwed me.  What I got was labeled "Directors Cut", however Wikipedia does not support it.  The Director's Cut was supposed to have removed the horrible voice overs, it was supposed to add a daydream scene in the middle that would make the ending make a whole lot more sense, and it was supposed to have ditched the cliche Hollywood happy ending.  All of these changes would be welcome ones.  Because of this, I suppose I will watch it again eventually, in the form of the "Final Cut" version that is now out on Blu-Ray.

Odd, that I will be watching a movie for the third time that I rated a B...

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