Blade Runner

      Once you get passed the music score of extremely dated 80’s synthesizer music, Blade Runner is a pretty awesome movie. I have to admit, that the music was a tad distracting…

       Blade Runner can not only be classified as a science fiction film, but also has strong elements of Noir-like detection throughout Rick Deckard’s adventure… According to Raymond Chandler, true detective fiction includes the following elements: A hard, shady, disreputable city, and a mysterious, poor, yet honorable hero, in the city, but not of it. Blade Runner, set in the futuristic Los Angeles and presenting Harrison Ford’s Deckard as detective, has exactly that. Rick follows clues to track down and "retire" AWOL Replicants.

       Although Deckard’s main detective work centers on tracking Roy and the other escaped replicants, the real mystery around this film is Rachel. It is established early on that the main difference between a human and replicant is presence or lack of empathy. Although they can perhaps give the right answers to questions that are supposed induce an emotional response, the replicant lacking empathy will not give a physical response like a human. However, Rachel, a new design of replicant is different. Although Deckard is finally able to deduce the fact that she is a replicant, it takes him a much longer time to detect lack of empathy and emotion. Even as a replicant, out of everyone in the film, Rachel’s character experiences the most growth.

       Blade Runner essentially targets what it means to be human. In earlier examples of detective fiction, we see the justification of killing those who are evil or contaminated by "savage" foreign lands, those who are hardened criminals. What makes the criminal’s murders an atrocious act but a detective’s vigilante justice good? The people killed in both cases are both similarly... dead. Who deserves it and who doesn’t? Who counts as being... human?
       According to Blade Runner, the difference between human and all other living organisms on this earth, whether animal or replicant, is the presence of empathy. This is why killing a human is murder and killing a replicant is “retirement.” The movie suggests however, given enough intelligence and especially given enough time, empathy can be developed or learned… This might be why Rachel is so much more advanced than other replicants in the love department. Although she has not truly had her own life experiences to develop these emotions, the fact that she has memories (although not her own) of a lifetime of emotional experiences, she has so much more depth of character. Would killing her retirement? She is in fact a replicant... but she experiences both empathy and love! Retirement or murder? Murder or justice? She seems to have even more emotional depth than our detached, hard-boiled detective, Deckard...
       …Which leads us to another mystery which is currently driving me mad…

       Rachel asks whether or not Deckard had been given the replicant emotional response test. Is Deckard just a detached human? Or is he a replicant with emotions and no knowledge of his true existence like Rachel had been? The reason why the director’s cut is SO MUCH BETTER is because the ending leaves this question ambiguous and unanswered. The real end of the movie was written very “Hollywood” and frankly takes away much of the depth that this movie was going for.