Existential sci-fi classic has stood test of time

2019 came early for this film lover. As a 12-year-old, I was not among those who saw Blade Runner when it first opened in 1982. (Given that the film was 27 th at the box office that year, not many were.) But within a few years the film had become a staple of my adolescent viewing, thanks in part to CityTV’s habit of airing it in the Toronto market every New Year’s Eve. We’re one year closer to the future, it seemed to be saying: Get ready.

Ridley Scott’s dystopic vision, loosely adapted from Philip K. Dick’s novel Do Androids Dream of Electric Sheep?, suggested huge populations on the move, rampant environmental pollution and extreme climate change, all issues of its time that have only grown since. (I recall hatching a pet theory that if hydrogen became the fuel source for cars, all that water-vapour emission would of course lead to the endless rain seen in the film.)

But Blade Runner also touched on topics less dire but just as urgent. What does it mean to be human? What is memory, and how is it tied together with our concepts of identity, existence, soul? What is free will, and does it even exist? (I can attest that from the moment word arrived of a sequel in the works, I could no more avoid going to it than I could will my heart to stop beating.)

Blade Runner gave us futuristic androids called replicants — the term came from the daughter of co-screenwriter David Peoples, who suggested a version of “replicating,” a term used in cloning. They were built under the motto “More human than human,” which made them the perfect avatars for our fears and hopes.

After all, one of the few traits that humans seem not to share with other animals is a sense of mortality; and even here our grasp of our own future non-existence can be tenuous at times. Your dog doesn’t know it’s going to cease to be. Neither does your computer. But replicants are acutely aware that their days are numbered — in fact, they number 1,461, or four years.

Not all of these existential issues settled in my young brain at once. In the beginning, Blade Runner was just a really cool science-fiction story, with flying cars and impossible airships and machines that could look deep into a photograph, or deep into your soul. It was also a fantastic film noir, with a hard-boiled voice-over from its grouchy detective main character. (Critics at the time hated the on-the-nose narration, but even Blade Runner 2049 director Denis Villeneuve has said he was captivated by it as a youth.)

It was a high watermark in immersive set design (Oscarnominated for set decoration and visual effects) as well as in sound design and score, thanks to the eerie compositions of Evangelos Odysseas Papathanassiou (a.k.a. Vangelis), which sound as futuristic today as they did 35 years ago.

But the true enduring beauty of Blade Runner is that you can revisit it, again and again, and pick up more details each time. This was literally true when various new edits started to appear in the 1990s, culminating in Scott’s 2007 “Final Cut” that suggests — though the argument will never be settled to everyone’s satisfaction — that Deckard is also a replicant.

Blade Runner 2049 builds on all that was great in the original — the look, the feel, the philosophy and just the gosh-darned coolness of it all. It is true that all those moments will be lost in time, like tears in rain. But it’s not time to die just yet. There’s still time to savour the past, the present and the future that is Blade Runner.