Blade Runner was Ridley Scott’s immediate follow up to Alien. When it came out in 1982 it was pretty much the grimmest film ever made up to that point. It has since had a profound influence upon the look and atmosphere of the recent entertainment boom-industry in dystopian futurism. Scott's exacting and monomaniacal set design and photography produced a world of perpetual night, fog, and neon.
In watching such films, set in worlds of grim people and even grimmer horizons, one might ask, “what is anyone in it fighting for?” The answer within Ridley Scott’s head seems to have been that the characters fight to make it to the next light spill revealing his fastidiously designed sets and effects.
The answer within the plot is that there are service robots, built to perform backbreaking labor off-world who have infiltrated Earth’s dwindling population. These robots have everything we do: desire, intelligence, wit. They have evolved past their original programming and want to survive. Human beings, afraid of being replaced in their fragile and dwindling numbers want them disposed of.
The plot is basic action movie fodder with plot developments arising only to move us between atmospheric and action set pieces. The characters remain thin and poorly defined and the world they live in is nearly impossible to extrapolate beyond the frame based on the little we are told.
But perhaps that shows just how elemental a fear it is for robots to take on a convincing humanity. The only fears that get such shorthand story telling treatment, merely saying their name before plunging headlong into two hours of otherwise unmotivated chases and explosions, are only the most primal: murder, kidnapping, natural disasters. If a movie like Blade Runner is to be considered in that light perhaps we should add fake humans to that list of absolutely integral human fears.
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