the original theatrical release
What can you say about Blade Runner that hasn’t already been said? It’s just such a rich, haunting, atmospheric, meaningful, and multifaceted film, one you can appreciate purely as one of the great visual achievements in cinema history, or for its fascinating exploration of what it means to be human. As far as the art of cinema is concerned, it’s Blade Runner’s visual legacy that looms the largest. Itself heavily influenced by film noirs of the 1940s, complete with its trenchcoat-wearing, hard-drinking detective who talks to us in detached voiceover–at least inthe original theatrical release– Blade Runner’s vision of 21st-century Los Angeles is perhaps the most iconic and inescapably influential fictional city ever put on film.