Film

Amid all the brouhaha over the multiple versions and “director’s cut” versus “final cut,” the sheer awesomeness of Blade Runner is in serious danger of getting lost in the shuffle. On a big screen—and this is a film that deserves to be seen on the biggest screen you can find—Scott’s dark visual poetry is hypnotic. Los Angeles circa 2019 is a jumble of the future (flying cars) and the past (fedoras, wide lapels and noirish lighting schemes).

As the troubled replicant-killing cop Deckard, Ford has a slightly wooden delivery that turns out to be exactly what is called for. And what can we say about Hauer’s batshit greatness as replicant supergenius Roy Batty? He’s a villain of Miltonian dimensions, the angel cast out of heaven who returns to storm the gates.

Seen with fresh eyes—which are the film’s key motif, by the way, from the giant close-up of the cityscape reflected in an eye in the second shot to the eye cloner to the eerily glowing peepers of Young as a replicant fatale—Blade Runner is a dreamlike meditation on our fear of our own mortality.