The binding of these themes and styles come to their most potent connection at Blade Runner’s climax, which sees Rick Deckard’s (Harrison Ford) final confrontation with Roy Batty (Rutger Hauer), one of the Replicants on Deckard’s trail. Concepts focusing moral implications of genetic engineering, religion and our cultural understanding of what makes one “human” in the midst of technophobic paranoia had never been tackled in cinema quite like Blade Runner attempted, and especially not in a style that fused dystopia with a classic, noir-ish filmmaking approach. Dick’s original novel and screenwriter Hampton Fancher’s adaptation, is still very relevant in how heavily influential it has been on the science fiction genre, both aesthetically and thematically. The director’s bleak vision of the future, which takes notes from Phillip K. Even today, the film still turns heads at how remarkably it managed to bring Ridley Scott’s dystopian vision to life and appear so realistically. The first thing people often talk about in regards to Blade Runner is its visual effects, which were astonishingly ahead of their time in 1982. Harrison Ford plays Rick Deckard, a cop from a special unit known as Blade Runners, who has been assigned to locate and “retire” four rogue Replicants searching for their creator in hopes he will extend their limited lifespan.
Dick novel Do Androids Dream of Electric Sheep?, Blade Runner takes place in San Francisco, circa 2019: a time in which artificial, human-like beings known as Replicants have been outlawed on Earth.