Title: Blade Runner
Year: 1982
Language: English
Country: USA, Hong Kong
Genre: Sci-Fi, Thriller
Director: Ridley Scott
Writers:
Hampton Fancher
David Webb Peoples
Philip K. Dick
Cast:
Harrison Ford
Rutger Hauer
Sean Young
Daryl Hannah
William Sanderson
Joe Turkel
Edward James Olmos
M. Emmet Walsh
Joanna Cassidy
James Hong
Morgan Paull
Kevin Thompson
Rating: 9/10

I have finished this epochal cult film’s final cut version (not much as a rematch since it vaguely left me any impression from the very first encounter, which took place more than 10 years ago), the film hasn’t dated at all for 30 years, is still sharply crafty with an astonishingly visual impetus, which is pristinely avant-garde as well as its subversive kernel about the clone ethnics.

BLADE RUNNER is an atypical Sci-Fi breed (loosely based on science fiction mogul Philip K. Dick’s novel “Do Androids Dream of Electric Sheep?”), especially among its time overlapping with STAR WARS trilogy’s heyday, it turns a completely opposite aesthetic approach (the nearly all moist and dingy settings, an anti-hero and anti-villain characterization, a foredoomed fatalism spin, the grotesque costume and character moulding, parsimonious fighting sequences), which bears itself out as one of the paramount film in its genre. The film might be trapped in its lengthy narrative tempo, but every single scene is devised with a cataclysmic desperation, resembles Ridley Scott’s renowned career-breaking masterpiece ALIEN (1979).

While Harrison Ford plays against his comfort zone as a battered “human” blade runner, its’s Rutger Hauer’s replicant Roy Batty overshadows everyone else, buoyed up the somber aura using his near hysterical interpretation of a perplexed highly-intellectual creature whose resentment and despair are so palatable and evocative.

The birth of the film was a notorious plight at that time, with an alienated team and financial lapse, even after its theatrical release, its flaccid box office performance sentenced the demise of its outlook, that said, it is a film ahead of its audience by many years, and now its classic rank has been established, how comforting and gratifying.

ps. this year Scott’s much-hyped prequel of ALIEN sega, PROMETHEUS has unveiled its second trailer, which seems that Scott is back on his virtuoso trajectory, another bona fide classic is forthcoming? This summer it is a battle between PROMETHEUS and THE DARK KNIGHT RISES, keeping fingers crossed it will be a win-win denouement.