For 25 years, Blade Runner has intrigued and delighted audiences with its tale of a jaded police assassin on the trail of four deadly humanoid Replicants in a dystopian future LA. Paul Simpson explores the film's evolution and its enduring appeal.

Amid the explosion of futuristic and fantasy films that appeared in the wake of the original Star Wars in 1977, very few could be called 'real' science fiction. Audiences flocked to Superman, Close Encounters of the Third Kind and Flash Gordon, and, in 1982, preferred the manipulative delights of Spielberg’s ET to one of the few proper SF films around: Ridley Scott’s Blade Runner.

But now, 25 years after Scott's vision of a dystopian Los Angeles first hit the screens, it is recognised as one of the most powerful films of the 80s. Harrison Ford, fresh from pulp success as Han Solo and Indiana Jones, plays Rick Deckard, a former Blade Runner, coerced into tracking down and 'retiring' (i.e. executing) a group of manufactured humanoid slaves called Replicants. He is eventually successful, but only because the Replicant leader (hauntingly played by Rutger Hauer) chooses to save his life.

Visually, the film is a tour de force. Working with conceptual artist Syd Mead, Scott conjured an urban nightmare of LA from the opening frames. Giant billboards fill the sky; blimps pass overhead advertising the delights of the colonies; and the traffic moves in three dimensions, as skimmers jostle for position. Apart from one moment at the end, it’s always raining. The language is cosmopolitan. English, Hungarian, Spanish and Japanese mix into a Cityspeak all its own.

Moebius trip

The influences on this landscape are clear. Fritz Lang’s Metropolis, made 55 years earlier, had the same feel of urban decay, particularly in the undercity, while The Long Tomorrow by French comic artist Moebius was a clear visual inspiration. Moebius, aka Jean Giraud, had been involved with Scott's earlier film Alien, but was contracted elsewhere during the making of Blade Runner.

But the film's clearest narrative influence was, of course, the Philip K Dick story upon which it was based, Do Androids Dream of Electric Sheep? Written in 1968, the story is set in the San Francisco of 1992, a time when real animals were virtually priceless. The plot is similar to the movie (which is set in 2019), though in the novel Deckard is simply a bounty hunter, trying to earn enough money to buy himself a real sheep.

Screenwriter Hampton Fancher prepared an adaptation of Dick’s novel in 1978, which attracted Ridley Scott’s attention two years later. The two worked on a draft of the screenplay, but fell out shortly before filming began in 1981. Scott brought David Peoples in to work on a final draft, then created the shooting script himself from the various versions. During filming, Fancher returned to work on necessary tweaks.

Unfortunately, it seems that the film was budgeted too low to fulfil the vision depicted in the script, leading to tension on set. Scott also disagreed with his leading man about who and what Deckard was, and only completed the movie after the studio had officially let him go. Scott and Ford have subsequently played down these disagreements (and both contribute to the Special Edition DVD due out later this year), but contemporary accounts make clear that this was not a happy set.

Running commentary

The version of Blade Runner that opened in cinemas in 1982 wasn’t the one that Scott had intended. The original screenplay allowed the events and the actors to speak for themselves, making the audience work to understand what was going on, but the version that went on general release featured a voiceover, to explain everything (as well as re-voicing a scene where Deckard gains vital information).

The voiceover was written by veteran TV screenwriter Roland Kibbee and recorded by Harrison Ford. According to some sources, Ford deliberately read it flatly so that it would be unusable, though the actor has recently denied this. The version now available on DVD dispenses with the voiceover, but that's not the only difference between it and the 1982 version.

In the middle of Scott's cut of the film, Deckard falls asleep and dreams of a unicorn; at the end, an origami unicorn has been left in his apartment, implying that, perhaps, he too was a Replicant, whose memories had also been implanted. But, in the theatrical version, the dream sequence is gone, and the voiceover gives another explanation for the unicorn.

Even more egregiously, a ‘happy ending’ was tacked onto the movie for its cinema release, using B-roll footage from Stanley Kubrick's version of The Shining to depict Deckard and Rachel driving out to a new life in unspoilt countryside. Utterly out of keeping with the rest of the film, it totally negates the dystopian feel of the movie in its closing frames!

Another cut of the blade

In 1991, a workprint of Scott's original cut of the film was shown at various campuses around America, and heralded as a ‘Director’s Cut’. This prompted Scott to work on a more definitive edition, which was released to the public the following year. The new cut reversed the changes made by the studio in 1981, but didn't include the additional violent footage originally used in the international version of the film.

Subsequently, Scott has worked on a further version of the film, which will be released on DVD later this year, but it is the 1992 director's cut that has come to be seen as the definitive version. As the years have passed, it has come to be hailed as a masterpiece of the genre, its influence widely apparent in numerous books and films (though some have claimed that Blade Runner heavily influenced the cyberpunk movement, it’s more likely that both drew on the same influences).

There has never been a direct sequel to Blade Runner, despite three novels that have tried to marry Dick’s world with the setup of the movie. The 1998 film Soldier, written by David Peoples, was supposedly set in the same universe, and featured references to battles at the Tannhauser Gate and the Shoulder of Orion.

But with fans forever debating whether Deckard himself is a Replicant, destined to have only a few years with Rachel (as Ridley Scott has often maintained), perhaps it’s better not to know what happened next…