Quite an experience to live in fear, isn't it? That's what it is to be a slave.
Rick Deckard is a retired police officer in Los Angeles in the year 2018. At one point, that time had some mystique surrounding it, but as 2011 is in full sway, it has waned a bit. But it doesn’t matter. We could watch the movie in the same spirit as one watched The Watchmen, in the sense that The Watchmen gave us a world that could have happened under different circumstances. Deckard in Blade Runner is in a Los Angeles that could have been, and if it hasn’t been yet, it doesn’t seem out of the question some time down the road. At a bar, Deckard is told by his old boss that some replicants are on the loose. We’re not given all the details, but we’re safe in concluding the replicants aren’t human. They were ‘created’ in some way, and they resemble humans in all the noticeable ways. The primary role for them, the reason they've been created, seems to be for fighting in wars or slaving away in a colony somewhere millions of miles from Earth. In this dystopia in the future, wars needn’t any longer be a threat to human life, or sweatshops needn’t any longer be a place for humans: the replicants are the replacement.
Before retirement, Deckard was a Blade Runner, someone who was sent to capture fugitive or lawless replicants and ‘retire’ them. A Voight-Kampf test is administered to determine whether the alleged replicant was human or not. If the suspect shows empathy to a series of questions, it’s spared and seen as human; if not, it is ‘retired’. When another blade runner, Holden, was giving the test to a replicant named Leon, Leon snaps and kills Holden. Deckard watches the footage on a video. Upon seeing the video, he agrees to capture the replicant responsible. But before he is on his way, his old boss tells him that Leon is under the leadership of Roy Batty and two others, Pris and Zhora. The strange thing about these replicants is that when they were made, they were designed to ‘shut-down’ after 4 years just in case they started to develop any emotion and desires for freedom. These replicants have escaped from a slave-colony on another planet, traveled to Earth, because they were intrepid enough to want to expand their lifespan in order to gain emotion and freedom.
Roy and Leon are on a quest to meet Tyrell, the creator of the replicants and CEO of Tyrell Corporation with the ominous slogan: more human than human. In the mean time, there is an interesting side-story involving Deckard and Rachael, an advanced replicant of the Nexus-6 model, who thinks she’s human, and who had to undergo a more advanced Voight-Kampf test to prove she’s a replicant. Tyrell ended up making her his master creation and implanted her with memories of his niece, so that in her consciousness, she’d think the memories were hers. Rachael has feelings for Deckard, but Deckard knows she’s a replicant, and after Deckard tells her that her memories are a fraud, she runs away in a despair, or the only kind of despair she’s capable of.
As Deckard retires one replicant after another, Roy presents a problem. Following certain clues, Roy locates Tyrell and asks for his life-extension.
Tyrell: [Tyrell explains to Roy why he can't extend his lifespan] The facts of life... to make an alteration in the evolvement of an organic life system is fatal. A coding sequence cannot be revised once it's been established.
Batty: Why not?
Tyrell: Because by the second day of incubation, any cells that have undergone reversion mutation give rise to revertant colonies, like rats leaving a sinking ship; then the ship... sinks.
Batty: What about EMS-3 recombination?
Tyrell: We've already tried it - ethyl, methane, sulfinate as an alkylating agent and potent mutagen; it created a virus so lethal the subject was dead before it even left the table.
Batty: Then a repressor protein, that would block the operating cells.
Tyrell: Wouldn't obstruct replication; but it does give rise to an error in replication, so that the newly formed DNA strand carries with it a mutation - and you've got a virus again... but this, all of this is academic. You were made as well as we could make you.
Batty: But not to last.
Tyrell: The light that burns twice as bright burns for half as long - and you have burned so very, very brightly, Roy. Look at you: you're the Prodigal Son; you're quite a prize!
Batty: I've done... questionable things.
Tyrell: Also extraordinary things; revel in your time.
Batty: Nothing the God of biomechanics wouldn't let you into heaven for.
Roy doesn't want to die! He's going over all the scientific ways to extend his life. But none work. He asking his creator why he has to die! He wants to live forever.
Tyrell: Would you... like to be upgraded?
Batty: I had in mind something a little more radical.
Tyrell: What... what seems to be the problem?
Batty: Death.
Tyrell: Death; ah, well that's a little out of my jurisdiction. You...
Batty: *I want more life, fucker
Roy kisses Tyrell, and then kills him. Deckard and Roy then meet in an abandoned building, but Deckard is no match for Roy's strength. For all that, however, Roy's 4-year lifespan is coming full circle, and he begins to die. Deckard knows he doesn't stand a chance, and as he is effortlessly saved from certain death as he was hanging off the side of skyscraper, and as life slowly slips away from Roy, Deckard is witness to one of the most heartbreaking scenes in all cinema:
Our lives are like tears in the rain. Beautiful. The movie about accepting our own death! The movie was adapted from a novel by Phillip K. Dick called Do Androids Dream of Electric Sleep? The look of the film is so out of this world awesome that to praise it would be to say nothing new. The special effects gave Los Angeles a look that'll never be forgotten. The theme of Frankenstein is evident throughout. As I'm watching, the movie touches something in me. I don't want to die! Not yet anyway. And in your heart of hearts, you're wondering who the heck made me to die! Why do we die!? The scene above encapsulates the futility of mortality perfectly. If you haven't seen it, see it; if you have, see it again!
If you don't want to die, then have you failed your God in some way? Is it time he began to rip away your earthly bonds?
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