First ‘Blade Runner’ was like ‘the birth of a world’
1982 classic set a sci-fi standard that still endures
Denis Villeneuve fell in love with the world of Blade Runner before he ever saw the original
1982 film.
Growing up in Quebec, the man who would later direct the sequel Blade Runner 2049 lived for sci-fi magazines like Starlog and Fantastic Films, hungry for news of the next Star Wars or the latest new space opera. Seeing the first stills of Blade Runner’s futuristic neo-noir landscape, though, blew his teenage mind.
“I was looking at these images and I was dreaming, and the gap between the dream and the movie is always a bit disappointing. But it didn’t happen with Blade Runner,” says Villeneuve,
50.
Based on a novel by Philip K. Dick (1968’s Do Androids Dream of Electric Sheep?), Ridley Scott’s film wasn’t a hit when it came out, and reviews weren’t kind — “I got slaughtered, and I’ve never read a critique since,” Scott recently told USA TODAY. It would evolve into an undisputed sci-fi classic, one that won the hearts of cinephiles and sci-fi fans alike and influenced a generation of filmmakers like Villeneuve. (He hasn’t been critically hammered: 2049 has earned overwhelming positive reviews, with a 95% “fresh” rating on the aggregate review site Rotten Tomatoes.)
Arriving in theaters before
2049 star Ryan Gosling turned 2, the first Blade Runner starred Harrison Ford as Rick Deckard, an ex-cop in Los Angeles circa
2019 whose job as a “blade runner” was to hunt down bioengineered androids called replicants. Deckard is brought back into the fold to “retire” four replicants that have gone rogue, and he falls for a replicant named Rachael (Sean Young) who believes she’s human.
Villeneuve recalls being in awe of the directing, characters and themes. Blade Runner was “like the birth of a world,” he says. “It was the first time seeing something that described what could be our future — not in a fantasy way but almost in a sociological approach. What would be the future of humanity in 40 or 50 years? It was quite a powerful experience.”
Scott created, as he did with 1979’s Alien, a landscape “that has always enticed people and been seen as a work of art,” says Jeff Bock, senior box office analyst for Exhibitor Relations, who believes Blade Runner has the same foothold in sci-fi lore as 2001: A Space Odyssey and Star Wars. “And to then expand on that with new technology 35 years later, like they did with TRON or Mad Max, people will respond.”
The first film’s densely detailed world is part of why Blade Runner endures, says Paul M. Sammon, author of the comprehensive new book Future Noir: The Making of Blade Runner and a journalist who was embedded on the original production. “You can endlessly watch this picture and see something you didn’t catch in the corner of a frame.”
But in addition to timeless eye candy, Sammon also finds it “an extremely sad and moving ” film exploring universal topics of mortality. “We all want to live longer — we don’t want to die,” he says. “And we are going to die, and there’s no way around it.
“Ultimately there’s more to Blade Runner than meets the eye. And when you surrender to it, you just become immersed in this environment.”