Los Angeles, November 2019. The Tyrell Corporation builds genetically engineered humans called replicants – stronger and faster than the people who made them, used as slave labour in the off-world colonies and outlawed on Earth. When a group of Nexus-6 replicants hijacks a shuttle and returns to the city, burnt-out detective Rick Deckard is pulled out of retirement and back into service as a “blade runner”: an officer licensed to hunt down and “retire” them.

Led by Roy Batty, the fugitives are looking for their maker, and for a way past the four-year lifespan he engineered into them. As Deckard works through the group and falls for Rachael, a Tyrell employee who does not know what she is, the distance between hunter and hunted – and between human and machine – steadily collapses.

Adapted from Philip K. Dick’s 1968 novel Do Androids Dream of Electric Sheep?, Ridley Scott’s 1982 film runs 117 minutes and all but invented the look of screen science fiction that followed it: perpetual rain, towering advertising, and a future built on top of the ruins of the present.

• Director: Ridley Scott
• Novel: Philip K. Dick – Do Androids Dream of Electric Sheep? (1968)
• Screenplay: Hampton Fancher & David Peoples
• Music: Vangelis
• Released: 1982 · 117 min

• Harrison FordDeckard
• Rutger HauerBatty
• Sean YoungRachael
• Edward James OlmosGaff
• M. Emmet WalshBryant
• Daryl HannahPris
• William SandersonSebastian
• Brion JamesLeon
• Joe TurkelTyrell
• Joanna CassidyZhora

• The city was designed by Syd Mead, credited as “visual futurist”, with production design by Lawrence G. Paull and effects by Douglas Trumbull. Jordan Cronenweth shot it through smoke and hard shafts of light – the style the film is still copied for.
• Rutger Hauer rewrote Roy Batty’s closing speech himself the night before it was filmed, cutting the scripted version down and adding the “tears in rain” line.
• The shoot was long and tense, and Ford and Scott disagreed openly over Deckard. Crew shirts from the production read “Yes Guv’nor, my ass”.
• The 1982 theatrical release carried a studio-mandated Deckard voice-over and an upbeat closing drive, assembled from aerial footage left unused by Stanley Kubrick on The Shining.
• It opened against E.T. in June 1982 and lost. The reputation was built afterwards, on video and in revival screenings.
• The 1992 Director’s Cut dropped the narration and the tacked-on ending and restored the unicorn daydream. The 2007 Final Cut is the only version Scott controlled completely.
• Added to the US National Film Registry in 1993 as “culturally, historically, or aesthetically significant”.