Movie Rewind: Blade Runner (1982)

Director: Ridley Scott (Alien, Gladiator)

Cast: Harrison Ford (Indiana Jones, Star Wars), Rutger Hauer (Sin City), Sean Young (Dune), Edward James Olmos (Battlestar Galactica)

The Deal: In dystopian Los Angeles, circa 2019, Rick Deckard (Ford) is a blade runner, a cop who specializes in killing replicants (biologically engineering humanoid beings). When six replicants escape from an off-world colony, Deckard is forced out of retirement to hunt them down. Based on the novel "Do Androids Dream of Electric Sheep" by Philip K. Dick.

Thoughts: I had heard so many great things about this film, and it is generally considered one of, if not the best film in my favorite genre. I wanted to like the film more, in fact, I wanted to love this film, but alas, I found it disappointing. It took me three tries to watch this movie, having fallen asleep the first two.

For as good of a job as Scott did creating this believable futuristic world full of things sci-fi fans only could dream about, the pacing of the fill was surprisingly slow. It was very dark in most of the scenes, and there was lots of dialogue, some of it very interesting, some of it very boring. I never really felt any of the suspense or tension that was intended until the last few scenes of the film. It does a good job of portraying man's obsession with creating equal beings, and really questions what it is to be human, but it spends to much time doing this.

The acting was solid, but it wasn't anything that left me gushing. Ford generally does a good job of always bringing an above average performance to his his roles, and he did in this, but I find it lost behind so many of his other more memorable roles (Indiana Jones, Han Solo, and even President Marshall). Hauer and Young were both solid, though I thought Young's performance stood out the most in the film. She did quite a good job portraying a replicant that believes she is human.

Verdict: Though the scenery and ideas were very ambitious, they couldn't distract enough from the film's slow pace. Though I find it overrated, it's hard to ignore its intentions and contributions to science fiction. ☆☆☆

Liked It? Try These: Dark City (1998), Minority Report (2002), Total Recall (1990)