We, Replicants

I saw Blade Runner 25 years ago and is my favorite film. Now it is reviving and rehabilitated as a masterpiece. Slate even writes a note on it. The replicants are godly; beautiful, amoral, utterly without pity. The humans, meanwhile, are portraits of sallow, creepy-crawly compromise: emotionally stunted, cynical, two-faced. "More human than human," crowed the corporation that designed the replicants. The film pushes the unintended irony of the slogan to its maximum conclusion. Replicants love and die with auroral intensity; we humans are the walking dead. The replicants, who are on a mission to extend their four year life span, display a stronger sense of community than the human beings on earth. With his three partners now destroyed by explosive bullets, the silver-blonde replicant Roy Batty (Rutger Hauer) succeeds in finding his way to Dr Elron Tyrell himself, the master of the Tyrell Corporation and the genetic engineering genius who actually designed him. At first, he is penitent ("I've done...questionable things...") and inquisitive ("I want more life, father"), reflecting the almost childish nature of him, yet this is contrasted with his superior intellect. When it becomes clear that Tyrell will not, or cannot, help him, he expresses one of the strongest showings of emotion in the movie by kissing, then crushing the head of his creator."

I've seen things you people wouldn't believe, says Batty, clutching a white dove to his naked breast. Attack ships on fire off the shoulder of Orion. I watched C-beams glitter in the dark near the Tannhauser gate. All those moments will be lost in time, like tears in rain. Time to die.

The story is untidy, full of contradictory details. The unicorn scene, where Deckard's minder leaves an origami unicorn to him to discover (Deckard had recurrent visions of a white unicorn, an implanted memory), is an indirect way to say that Deckard too is a replicant. "Arent we all?" The story is very unclear (or deep?). A masterpiece.