Way before Leonardo Dicaprio's Cobb had his totem in Inception and was questioning what was dream and what wasn't, Ridley Scott's Blade Runner had also used a small object to puzzle audiences and make them ask questions about what had just happened. Was Harrison Ford's character a robot? 28 years later we are still asking ourselves that same question and I bet that will likely be the same thing for Christopher Nolan's flawed but fascinating movie. I am not part of the camp that thinks Blade Runner is a great movie but it is one with images that resonate deeply in our heads. Its cult status is just that. A film that has been somewhat overrated all these years but still provokes fascinating debate in its premise and plot twists. The special effects might be spectacular for a film from 1982 but don't necessarily give us a high that is needed for a Sci-Fi classic, in other words it hasn't aged well ditto the bad 80's hair and clothes which portrays Los Angeles in 2019 in not just a social turmoil but fashion turmoil also.
If anything, the film is best seen as a layered but not quite fascinating portrait of a hell bound futuristic society. A society in which machines are just as much human as -say- humans. The replicants are so close to a sheer clone from us that they need to get tested by an expert to verify their fake-ness. Harrisson Ford's Deckard is put into that situation on the audience. Is he one of us? or is he one of them? to question our hero throughout the film director asks us to put aside our preconceived notions of what a male movie hero should be like. There are instances and there are clues but they all contradict one another in our reasoning's as to whom this man actually is. I'm sure the storyboard of Blade Runner was much more interesting that the final product. It's a movie that encompasses layer after layer but yet feels cold and isolated from its viewer.
For my money Steven Spielberg's Minority Report comes closest to what Scott probably wanted to do both visually and narratively with his film. Spielberg managed to make the best out of a Philip K Dick story by implementing his gift of storytelling and taking advantage of the advancement in Hollywood technology at his display. It isn't just Spielberg's film that will age better than Scott's film. Alfonso Cuarron's Children Of Men has been called our generation's Blade Runner. A masterpiece of visual storytelling, Cuarron's now classic film is a reminder that great Science Fiction still exists out there. It is interesting to see how the film has been gaining more recognition since its quiet release in December of 2006.