SECTOR FOUR: "FIERY THE ANGELS FELL"

November 2019. A gigantic blimp is hovering over the dark streets of Los Angeles, shouting to the crowds:

A new life awaits you in the Off-world colonies. The chance to begin again in a golden land of opportunity and adventure. New climate, recreational facilities... absolutely free. Use your new friend as a personal body servant or a tireless field hand: the custom tailored, genetically engineered, humanoid replicant designed especially for your needs. So come on America, let's put our team up there...

Whether the "New World" really is a paradise or not is uncertain, but the "Old World" is a living hell for sure. Earth is in a state of irreversible decay and everyone who can is fleeing Off-world. The environment has been exhausted by war, pollution and overpopulation. The wheather is hot and damp due to global warming.

Urbanisation has reached new levels and The City of Angels has become a monstrous metropolis. The sun can barely be seen on the dirty sky, where the ever-present police cars are flying by with twinkling navigation lights. The buildings are stretching 400 stories up in the sky, forming artificial canyons. On street level, the over-crowded alleys are bading in gloomy light from neon signs and video billboards with ever-smiling geishas.

The colonisation programme, the chance to escape the dying Earth, is dependent on the replicant labour cadres and the Tyrell Corporation is the main manufacturer.

In the Tyrell headquarters in Los Angeles, the Tyrell Pyramid, experienced blade runner Dave Holden is running Voight-Kampff tests on the employees; there is a possibility a group of escaped replicants might try to infiltrate the corporation. A routine session with a certain Leon Kowalski ends unexpectedly:

- Describe in single words only the good things that 

come into your mind about your mother.

- Let me tell you about my mother. 

Gunfire! Leon is not sensitive about his mother; in fact he has never had any mother, but been grown in a vat. Leon is not a human being; he is only a bio-mechanic imitation of a human being. Renegade replicants are walking the streets of Los Angeles.

Rick Deckard is an "ex-cop, ex-blade runner, ex-killer" according to himself. He is sick of his murderous profession: the prey becomes more human as well as more lethal for every new model launched on the market. Nevertheless, Deckard's former Rep-Detect boss, Captain Harry Bryant, forces him to fall into the blade runner ranks one more time:

You know the score, pal. If you're not a cop, you're little people. 

It does indeed take a professional to track down and terminate the escaped replicants, as they all possess superhuman strength and speed, as well as combat training. The group is lead by the highly sophisticated combat model Roy Batty and consists of Leon, Zhora, "retrained for Off-world kick murder squads" and Pris, "a standard pleasure model". They have escaped from their Off-world colony by hijacking a shuttle and killing the crew and passengers. Deckard is bewildered: why take the risk returning to Earth? He is worried too: he will have to face lethal combat models, state-of-the-art Nexus-6 replicants.  

When Deckard is invited to the Tyrell Corporation for Voight-Kampff test validation, he meets the neo-aristocratic Eldon Tyrell himself and his elegant assistant Rachael. Deckard reveals a shocking fact: a V-K test proves that Rachael is a replicant, manipulated with brain implants and unaware of her artificial origin. The meeting marks the beginning of an illegal love affair.  

Shadowed by his mysterious blade runner collegue Gaff, Deckard starts tracking the renegade replicants through the enormous city. Meanwhile, the replicants take meassures to meet their maker. Through Hannibal Chew, an eccentric designer of replicant eyes, they get in contact with the sick loner J. F. Sebastian, a brilliant genetic designer and Tyrell's right-hand man...

Does the title Blade Runner sound familiar? Well, it should. No other movie — perhaps with the exception of the original Star Wars movies — has been more influential on modern science fiction cinema. To say that 9 out of 10 sci-fi movies has drawn inspiration from Blade

Runner since its release in 1982 is by no means an exaggeration. Blade Runner has also inspired many debates on urbanisation, architecture, environment, ethics etc. and tend to appear in the most unexpected contexts.

Blade Runner's strongest impact has without  any doubt been visual. The director, the Englishman Ridley Scott, is famous for his obsessive richness of detail. Before Blade Runner, the future had never looked so worn-down, dirty, gloomy, oppressive and — perhaps above all — so convincing and plausible. The movie simply set a whole new standard for science fiction, just like the silent movie Metropolis did in 1926. Two decades have passed, but Blade Runner's F/X effects have aged amazingly well; it is even questionable if the the movie could have looked better had it been made today.

Blade Runner is so much more than eye-candy for sci-fi aficionados, though. The movie is based on or rather inspired by Philip K. Dick's thought-provocing novel Do Androids Dream of Electric Sheep from 1968. PKD was famous — he is gone by now, alas — for his wild and unpredictable imagination. It is easy to forget that Blade Runner actually deals with very complicated questions which PKD constantly struggled with: What is human? What is life? What is death? What is reality? Without any doubt, the movie paved way for later mind-blowing Hollywood flicks like The Matrix and Fight Club; they are, in a way, the grandchildren of Philip K. Dick.

Finally, Blade Runner has also become an icon of the probably most influential sci-fi movement in recent years: cyberpunk. Although cyberpunk officially was born with William Gibson's innovative novel Neuromancer in 1984, Blade Runner is the cyberpunk movie of all times.

Ironically, Blade Runner failed to charm both viewers and reviewers in 1982. The movie earned an almost fanatical fan following, though, and is often labeled the ultimate cult movie. When the Director's Cut was released in 1992, the reviews were generally very positive...

My description cannot really do Blade Runner justice. I can promise you one thing, though: it is a truly unique movie. You will either love it or hate it. Yours truly has been passionately in love with it for over a decade by now.