Blade Runner

Dir: Ridley Scott, 1982 (8.6*)

AFI and Time Mag Top 100

Good, but not the novel it was based on, Philip K. Dick’s Do Androids Dream of Electric Sheep? In fact, where that book focused on the electronic repairman who fixed electric animals (William Sanderson), this film’s lead character is Deckard, the detective played by Harrison Ford, who’s hired to track down some escaped androids, led by Rutger Hauer and Darryl Hannah, which are outlawed on earth, and take them out before they cause harm to humanoids. While searching out the renegade androids, Ford falls for Sean Young, who may or may not also be one. James Edward Olmos also has a good, abeit small part. The film is given "masterpiece" status for its dark, moody look at the future, but outside of a few city shots, the entire film takes place indoors, so it doesn’t really use its sf elements very much, and is eventually a film noir detective story in the future. The title was purchased from an unrelated sf book, and really had nothing to do with Dick’s book, which had nothing called blade runners in it; the producers simply wanted a shorter title. Spielberg filmed another of Dick's stories as the excellent Minority Report.