Blade Runner (1982)

Deckard, a blade runner, has to track down and terminate 4 replicants who hijacked a ship in space and have returned to Earth seeking their maker.

Director:

Ridley Scott

Writers:

Hampton Fancher (screenplay), David Webb Peoples (screenplay),

Stars:

Harrison Ford, Rutger Hauer, Sean Young

Top 250 #123 | Nominated for 2 Oscars. Another 10 wins & 15 nominations.

Cast

Cast overview, first billed only:
Harrison Ford	...	Rick Deckard
Rutger Hauer	...	Roy Batty
Sean Young	...	Rachael
Edward James Olmos	...	Gaff
M. Emmet Walsh	...	Bryant
Daryl Hannah	...	Pris
William Sanderson	...	J.F. Sebastian
Brion James	...	Leon Kowalski
Joe Turkel	...	Dr. Eldon Tyrell
Joanna Cassidy	...	Zhora
James Hong	...	Hannibal Chew
Morgan Paull	...	Holden
Kevin Thompson	...	Bear
John Edward Allen	...	Kaiser
Hy Pyke	...	Taffey Lewis

Storyline

In a cyberpunk vision of the future, man has developed the technology to create replicants, human clones used to serve in the colonies outside Earth but with fixed lifespans. In Los Angeles, 2019, Deckard is a Blade Runner, a cop who specializes in terminating replicants. Originally in retirement, he is forced to re-enter the force when four replicants escape from an off-world colony to Earth.

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Plot Keywords:

replicant | blade runner | future | cyberpunk | retirement | 

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Taglines:

The star of "RAIDERS OF THE LOST ARK" and the director of "ALIEN" take you on a spectacular journey to the savage world of the year 2019!!

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Genres:

Drama | Sci-Fi | Thriller

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Motion Picture Rating (MPAA)

Rated R for violence

Details

Official Sites:

Warner Bros [fr] Warner Bros. [us]

Country:

USA Hong Kong UK

Language:

English German Cantonese Japanese Hungarian

Release Date:

25 June 1982 (USA)

Also Known As:

Blade Runner: The Final Cut

Filming Locations:

Warner Brothers Burbank Studios - 4000 Warner Boulevard, Burbank, California, USA

Box Office

Budget:

$28,000,000 (estimated)

Opening Weekend:

$6,150,002 (USA) (25 June 1982)

Gross:

$1,445,283 (USA) (28 March 2008)

Company Credits

Production Co:

Ladd Company, The, Shaw Brothers, Warner Bros

Technical Specs

Runtime:

117 min

Sound Mix:

70 mm 6-Track (70 mm prints) Dolby Stereo (35 mm prints)

Color:

Color (Technicolor)

Aspect Ratio:

2.35 : 1

Did You Know?

Trivia

Among the folklore that has built up around the film over the years is the infamous 'Blade Runner Curse', which is the belief that the film was a curse to the companies whose logos were displayed prominently as product placements. While they were market leaders at the time, many of them experienced disastrous setbacks over the next decade and hardly exist anymore. RCA, for example which at one time was the leading consumer electronics and communications conglomerate, was bought out by one time parent GE in 1985, and dismantled. Atari, which dominated the home video game market when the film came out, never recovered from the next year's downturn in the industry, and by the 1990s had ceased to exist as anything more than a brand. The Atari of today is an entirely different firm, using the former company's name. Cuisinart similarly went bankrupt in 1989, though it lives on under new ownership. The Bell System monopoly was broken up that same year, and all of the resulting Regional Bell operating companies have since changed their names and merged back with each other and other companies to form the new AT&T. Pan Am suffered the terrorist bombing/destruction of Pan Am Flight 103 and went bankrupt in 1991, after a decade of mounting losses. The Coca-Cola Company, although still tremendously popular, suffered losses during its failed introduction of New Coke in 1985.

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Goofs

Deckard's instructions to the Esper seem to bear little relation to what the machine is actually doing as it navigates the photograph.

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Quotes

[first lines]
Female announcer over intercom: Next subject: Kowalski, Leon. Engineer, waste disposal. File section: New employee, six days.

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Crazy Credits

The opening credits sequence features a detailed, dictionary-style definition of the word Replicant.

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Connections

Featured in The Light That Burns: Remembering Jordan Cronenweth (2007)

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Soundtracks

"TALES OF THE FUTURE"
(uncredited)
Written by Vangelis
Performed by Demis Roussos

User Reviews

An incredibly beautiful-looking film as one would expect with director Ridley Scott…

But it's almost like an art movie, the first science-fiction art film… It's a futuristic film beautifully put together… It's really impeccably made by one of the great visionary directors… And you really saw a future that looked very different from the future you had seen before… A future that looked very believable like the visual-effects shots of the flying car going over a futuristic city… The fight sequence doesn't prepare you for the traumatic emotional side that there is in the film, it leaves you sort of broken…

There is a beautiful, delicate emotional great scene that I remember when I first saw the movie… I'm in the theater and I'm so drawn in what Rutger Hauer's doing… I'm so drawn in by what the theme of the movie has brought us to… The magnificent moment where he is letting go of life… And in those last moments of letting go of life he's really learned to appreciate life to the point where he spares Deckard's life, and where he's even holding a white dove because he just wants to have something that's alive in his hands… It's an amazing sort of crescendo that's going and there's Rutger saying: "I've seen things you people wouldn't believe. All these moments will be lost in time like tears in rain." Hauer puts all the things that are so amazing about people: sense of poetry, sense of humor, sense of sexuality, sense of the kid, sense of soul…

Scott brought out the best qualities in his performers… He coaxed and very gently manipulated performances from his actors that in some instances I think they've rarely topped… You feel the story, you feel the emotions of the characters and you will be lost in the middle of this wild world, you know, it's so rich and it's painful… I mean it's a very bluesy, dark story and told very compassionately…

The overpopulation, the sort of crowd scenes is so rich and varied and there's such an extreme detail designing the magazine covers, designing the look of the punks, the Hare Krishnas, the biological salesman, everything is designed… You have just Piccadilly Circus punks walking by… You have a sense of layers in that society… That is one of those things that you see again and again… The city landscape with the big billboards à la Kyoto or Tokyo… Scott was able to create the look based on what goes on in various cities all over the world… Whether it is Tokyo, Kyoto or Beijing or Hong Kong or whatever, you're right in "Blade Runner" country…

"Blade Runner," to me, embodies the elegance, the power, and the uniqueness of a film experience… It's the most classical, beautiful, purest movie-making writing and then the film-making itself is… The images and the sound and the music, it's pure cinema… Ridley came out with an amazing, brilliantly executed future of an absolute dystopia… The intensity of his perfectionism on "Blade Runner" made the movie… This is a master at his best…