Latter Day Ruminations on BLADE RUNNER

BLADE RUNNER is one of my all-time favorite films. Some time back, I wrote an appreciation that was posted on my friend Stephen's excellent blog, Frightfully Pleased. Read it first, si vous plait.


http://frightfullypleased.blogspot.com/search?q=blade+runner







So even since that review, I've watched the movie several more times. Having that deluxe 5-disc set just lends itself to repeat viewings. The documentaries just feed the obsession. Also, I am no longer the innocent lad who first discovered this darkly ambitious tale back during its original release in 1982. My recent screenings have brought questions that I perhaps had entertained in the past, but never thought on beyond a fleeting musing. The 21st century has since come, and some of the film's (and source author Philip K. Dick's) technology has gotten closer to the original vision. It prompts some further inquiry:


1. The replicants in the story, the mechanical men and women with a 4 year life span, are created by the Tyrell Corporation. What was Dick's view on cloning? Immoral? Was the very crux that drives the narrative, that the replicants run amok, begin to question things, his statement on the danger of playing God?


2. Was Tyrell supposed to be God? Why does Roy, the protype replicant, the golden boy, seek out his creator, then kill him? Does this suggest that BLADE RUNNER is espousing that there is no god? That Roy represents rationality, man himself, destroying the god myth? Then dying like man always does? But what about the dove Roy was clutching? The dove that ascends after his death? Is it going to the afterlife?


3. Perhaps Roy was Dick's way of saying there IS a god, and that the wrongheadedness of cloning corrects itself by having man (now Tyrell) destroyed. Perhaps the replicants were manifestations of godless science, then God himself takes replicant form and corrects the situation. Then he sacrifices Himself, later to ascend to Heaven.


4. In light of these questions, just who made who?


5. Why would Tyrell give the replicants perspectives? Because he is God? Or were the replicants not given perspectives, but the Nexus series evolved, and gained them? Was natural selection at work?

After your own screening, have a roundtable, a coffee klatch, whatever! Discuss!