Blade Runner: The Final Cut

Ridley Scott’s seminal science fiction opus dazzled audiences with its vision of a 21st-century Los Angeles choked by neon and drowning in rain, where real human beings are scarcely distinguishable from androids. Adapted from Philip K. Dick’s Do Androids Dream of Electric Sheep?, the story of the “blade runner” Deckard (Harrison Ford in perhaps his finest performance)—a futuristic Philip Marlowe—and his hunt for four renegade “replicants” led by the psychotic Roy Batty (Rutger Hauer) ranks, in terms of narrative and design, among the most influential in modern movies, its lipstick traces evident in a wide array of subsequent sci-fi/fantasy successes including The Crow, Dark City, and the Matrix trilogy.