Everybody, quick! Burn all your trash, take up Chinese, start studying robotics, and invest all your money in hover-car technology, because Blade Runner takes place in 2019, and we're only seven years away.
Ridley Scott's Blade Runner is one of my absolute favorite films. It's a brilliant exploration of basic human inquiry (What is my role in life? How long do I have to live? Does my existence justify my being?), shown through the lives of beings both human and synthetic. It depicts a biomass settled at the bottom a mythical metropolis; a community whose only light is neon, whose existence is as negligible as rain.
I can't think of many fictional cities in film that come to life quite like Blade Runner's future L.A. As the film progresses, we fall into the city's rhythm - pick up on its patterns, its aura. Mobs of people migrate from one bus stop to the next, while blimps fly overhead, advertising off-world colonization. Monolithic superstructures tower over the public, supporting Coke ads that ask us to "Enjoy". We look up, and a smiling geisha pops yet another pill. We may question how we got here, but never have to ask where we are.
It's been said that the eye is the window to the soul. Replicants are depicted as having a band of glowing orange that encircles their retina. It's an immediately identifiable trait, and kind of calls into question as to why Deckard needed to do the whole interrogation thing (but you know, whatever). Looking back to the fourth photo in this post, though, and we see Roy Batty's eye without the orange hue. Roy is, of course, a replicant himself, and yet, his iris is a piercing blue. It always seemed to me that Roy was the most humanized character in the film. He's the only character with a self-imposed mission (to extend his longevity), a character who isn't an obvious pastiche (Deckard is the noir detective, Pris, the femme fatale, Rachael, the well-to-do woman in distress), and seems to be the only character who takes control of his destiny (by not only accepting, but choosing, to die). Scott has created several robots with vibrant personalities - the most recent example being David from Prometheus. It's funny how Scott's human characters sometimes speak like aliens, while his robotic characters often seem the most human.
Is Deckard a replicant? I honestly don't think the answer really matters. What I find more interesting to ponder is the fact that up until now, Deckard believed he was a man hunting machines, even though he was just actively carrying out orders - gunning down military droids with military proficiency.
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