Ridley Scott's 1982 dystopian sci-fi classic follows Rick Deckard (Harrison Ford), a "blade runner" tasked by the police with tracking down illegal robots who are nearly indistinguishable from human beings. The genetically engineered organic robots, known as "replicants," are designed for off-world colonies and strictly prohibited on Earth. Deckard's hunt for a group of four suspected replicants leads him to question his own motivations and ultimately the definition of humanity.
Scott's meticulous attention to detail means that the gritty 2019 Los Angeles of the movie feels fully realized. The film's strong art direction and dark style have gone on to influence a generation of filmmakers.
In an interview for Rod Serling's The Twilight Zone Magazine, author Philip K. Dick, who wrote the novel "Do Androids Dream of Electric Sheep?" on which the film was based, expressed his pleasure with what he saw of the film (he died a few months before the movie's release). In the interview, Dick said he disliked the original screenplay by writer Hampton Fancher but was much more pleased by the revised script by David Webb Peoples. "I saw a segment of Douglas Trumbull's special effects for 'Blade Runner' on the KNBC-TV news," Dick said. "I recognized it immediately. It was my own interior world. They caught it perfectly."
