In the summer of 1982, a science fiction film called Blade Runner premiered in theaters… and it was completely destroyed at the box office by E.T. The Extra-Terrestrial, which had already been in theaters for two weeks. It was a rough summer for genre films that weren’t about a little boy hiding a cuddly alien from his mom in his closet.
But 35 years later, Blade Runner is still considered one of the best and most influential science-fiction films ever made (and so is E.T., which shoots a lot of holes in any argument that says box office success has any correlation to quality).
Indeed, many of the best movies ever made, the films that inspired future filmmakers and went on to be hailed as timeless classics, were financially unsuccessful and either totally unpopular, or met with a mixed critical reception when they were originally released. Blade Runner joins films like It’s a Wonderful Life, Vertigo, The Big Lebowski and Fight Club on that illustrious list, and watching it again today, it’s easy to see why. And it’s even easier to see why it took so long for Blade Runner to find its audience.
Ridley’s Scott’s adaptation of Philip K. Dick’s tech-noir novel Do Androids Dream of Electric Sheep? - about a detective tasked with “retiring” rogue androids, nearly indistinguishable from humans - was a bold stylistic enterprise, a sprawling and detailed vision of the future with an intimate human drama at the forefront. It is also intentionally vague about much of its storyline and character development. That didn’t sit well with the studio, which recut the film to add a happy ending (using leftover footage from The Shining, no less) and forced Harrison Ford to record a monotone voiceover that explained the plot in detail, even when he was literally just describing what was happening on the screen.
And yet no amount of studio meddling could hide the film’s spectacular production design, based on concept designs by renowned futurist Syd Mead. His vision of a future Los Angeles, in which new and spectacular skyscrapers were built on the skeletons of earlier, classical architecture, is said to have given birth to the term “retro-fitting,” and with it a visual vocabulary was born that future storytellers would adapt to films ranging from Luc Besson’s The Fifth Element to Alex Proyas’ Dark City, from Richard Stanley’s Hardware to Mamoru Oshii’s Ghost in the Shell.
Of course, the visual aesthetic of Blade Runner didn’t emerge from a vacuum. Classic science-fiction films like Fritz Lang’s Metropolis (about a robot who looks human and undermines society) and Jean-Luc Godard’s Alphaville (about a detective investigating a mystery in a futuristic dystopia) had already set the stage for the tech-noir and closely-related cyberpunk genres.
But Ridley Scott’s Blade Runner came at an important turning point in genre cinema. Films like Star Wars and Ridley Scott’s previous film, Alien, had already taken advantage of new and astounding visual effects, which made far-out technological concepts seem plausible to audiences. As such, Blade Runner was told on a grander and yet simultaneously more realistic level, and it made a more profound impact on fellow and burgeoning filmmakers, who - thanks to the same advances in visual effects - were able to pick up what Scott had thrown down.
The vast cityscapes of Steven Spielberg’s A.I. Artificial Intelligence and even the planet Coruscant in George Lucas’s Star Wars prequels have a great deal in common with Blade Runner. There you will find more worlds built on top of other worlds, flying cars crowding what remains of the skyline, pollution choking the atmosphere, advertisements blazing in neon, and night club cultures where vices are enjoyed out in the open, all in a futuristic heap of sprawling urbanity.
Of course, Blade Runner inspired more than just a futuristic visual style. The door was opened for more ambitious and intellectual science-fiction stories to be told on a similarly massive scale, whether they were other Philip K. Dick adaptations like Paul Verhoeven’s Total Recall and Steven Spielberg’s Minority Report, or similar riffs on physical and mental oppression via futuristic technology and corporate malfeasance, the kind you’ll find in Terry Gilliam’s Brazil, The Wachowskis’ The Matrix, Kathryn Bigelow’s Strange Days, Andrew Niccol’s Gattaca and Christopher Nolan’s Inception.
And as technology evolved to meet Blade Runner’s predictions, more stories would be told that expanded on those ideas. Computers became smarter, and films like The Matrix, A.I., Ghost in the Shell, Alex Garland’s Ex Machina and the rebooted Battlestar Galactica television series would eventually explore what happens when imperfect human beings try to create a perfect race of their own. It’s an idea that goes all the way back to Frankenstein (or all the way back to Pygmalion) but which had to adapt to the actual evolution of technology, and Blade Runner - with its childlike Replicants, intelligent enough to make a great contribution to society but young enough to behave erratically - was one of the first great examples.
Blade Runner’s influence was not limited to motion pictures and television. You can find its influence in video games throughout the history of the medium. It’s hard to imagine the Metal Gear, Deus Ex and Bioshock franchises existing without Blade Runner to set a visual and thematic template of technology run rampant and infecting every aspect of culture and society.
It wasn’t just the content of Blade Runner that left a lasting legacy. It eventually became common knowledge that the theatrical cut of Blade Runner was a bastardized edition that didn’t live up to Ridley Scott’s vision. The work print would be rediscovered and re-released as the “Director’s Cut” and then, since that wasn’t technically the Director’s Cut at all, Scott would rework the film multiple times over the course of two decades.
This wasn’t the first time a movie had been released in a different edition. Films like The Wild Bunch and Close Encounters of the Third Kind had been re-released in theaters to take advantage of the novelty. It also seems to have been the first time the words “Director’s Cut” were used to market a movie, opening up a whole new aspect of the home video marketplace. These cuts are now common, and Ridley Scott himself took advantage of it several more times with re-released, often superior versions of films like Legend, Gladiator and Kingdom of Heaven.
The legacy of Blade Runner is long, and getting longer, and branches out into odd nooks and crannies. (See also: Marvel 2099, a comic book imprint that was basically just “Every Marvel Superhero Does Blade Runner.”) And if Blade Runner 2049 finds an audience faster than the original film did, that process might even accelerate. For fans of Blade Runner, that prospect offers a rare piece of hope for a future that, otherwise, we typically assume will be full of toxic urban sprawl and killer androids.
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