Blade Runner (1982): The Flop That Shaped the Future

Blade Runner opened in American cinemas on 25 June 1982 and did not do well. It underperformed at the North American box office and drew mixed reviews. Few films have recovered so completely from a poor start.

Over the following decades it became a cult favourite, then a classic, and its rain-soaked, neon-lit city became the template for how films imagine the future. Here is the story of the film, its several versions, and the question about its hero that fans still argue over.

From a novel by Philip K. Dick

The film was directed by Ridley Scott and based on Philip K. Dick's 1968 novel Do Androids Dream of Electric Sheep? Dick wrote dozens of novels about unstable realities and questions of identity, and this one asks what separates a human being from a convincing artificial copy.

The film keeps that question but changes much else, including the title. It moves the story to Los Angeles in 2019, a city of towering buildings, constant rain and crowded streets, a vision of the future far darker than the clean spaceships of most science fiction films of the time.

The story

Harrison Ford plays Rick Deckard, a former police officer pulled back into service as a blade runner, a hunter of replicants. Replicants are bioengineered humanoids, made to work off-world, and some of them have returned to Earth illegally.

Deckard must find and kill a group of them, led by Roy Batty, played by Rutger Hauer. Along the way he meets Rachael, played by Sean Young, a replicant who does not know she is one. The closer Deckard gets to his targets, the less clear it becomes who is the more human.

Testing for humanity

To tell replicants from people, blade runners use the Voight-Kampff test, a series of questions designed to provoke emotional reactions while a machine watches the subject's eyes. Replicants struggle to show the expected empathy.

It is a strange echo of a real idea: a test that judges whether something is human by how it responds in conversation. Our piece on the regions of science fiction places the film in cyberpunk, the subgenre of high technology and low life that it helped define.

A disappointment at first

The film arrived in the same summer as other big science fiction releases and struggled to find an audience. Its slow pace, its gloom and its ambiguity were not what many cinema-goers expected from Harrison Ford, then famous for adventure roles.

Studio worries had already shaped the film. The original theatrical version added a voice-over narration by Deckard, explaining the story, and a happy ending imposed by the studio, in which Deckard and Rachael drive away into the countryside.

The versions

Blade Runner exists in several versions, and which one you see matters. In 1992 Scott released a Director's Cut that removed both the narration and the happy ending, leaving a darker, more ambiguous film.

In 2007 he released the Final Cut, the only version over which he had full artistic control. Most viewers today watch the Final Cut, and many consider it the definitive film, though some still have affection for the narrated original.

Is Deckard a replicant?

The most famous argument about the film is whether Deckard himself is a replicant. The question is fuelled partly by a dream sequence involving a unicorn, which in the later versions connects to a small detail at the very end.

Different people involved in the film have answered differently, and the ambiguity is part of its appeal. If the hunter might be one of the hunted, the film's question about what makes someone human applies to its hero as much as to anyone.

Memories and what they prove

Rachael believes she is human because she remembers a childhood. Deckard discovers that her memories were implanted, borrowed from someone else, to make her easier to control. The revelation is one of the most unsettling moments in the film.

It raises a question that reaches beyond the story: if our sense of who we are rests on memories, and memories can be made, what proves that anyone is who they think they are? The replicants, built to live only a few years, want what any person wants: more life, and to be recognised as real.

A look that lasted

Much of the film's reputation rests on how it looks and sounds. Vangelis composed its electronic score, which was nominated for BAFTA and Golden Globe awards, and its moody synthesisers became inseparable from the image of a rain-soaked future city.

Real locations gave the future texture. The Bradbury Building in downtown Los Angeles, a nineteenth-century office building with a striking iron and glass atrium, pictured above, was one of the places where it was filmed.

Legacy

Blade Runner is now considered a foundational work of cyberpunk and a major influence on later science fiction in film, games, comics and novels. In 1993 it was selected for the US National Film Registry, which preserves films of lasting cultural importance.

A sequel, Blade Runner 2049, followed in 2017. For another film whose production was far from smooth, see how Star Wars was made, and for the books behind films like this, our classic science fiction list.