Using robots to philosophize about humans
The 1982 film Blade Runner
"We’re so accustomed to cinema being behind the political and cultural curve, that when a truly groundbreaking work arrives, no one’s sure how to deal with it. Blade Runner was viewed as a disaster upon first release.
It’s a film that, upon first showing, felt almost unbearably harsh and claustrophobic, lingering on images of cruelty, decay and exploitation. It was only years later that people began to realize exactly what Blade Runner was offering: a meditation on the meaning of life, morality, memory, creation, procreation, nature, nurture.
If Harrison Ford’s Deckard is himself a Replicant – and the film strongly implies that he is – then how do any of us know which aspects of our psyche are ‘real’ and which ‘created’? If the robots are programmed with more soul and compassion than the humans, how do you tell the difference? And does it matter?"-- Time Out
Most of the characters in Ridley Scott’s 1982 neo noir science fiction film Blade Runner are android robots, called Replicants. The film uses them to philosophically examine what it is to be human. The Replicants have the same types of hopes, dreams and aspirations as humans, but with shortened lifespans.
One of the Replicants, played by Sean Young, believes she is human. She is heartbroken when she learns from another Replicant that her secret childhood memories are an implant of the memories of the manufacturer’s niece.
Harrison Ford’s character, the human “blade runner” or hired assassin of escaped slave Replicants in a futuristic dystopian Los Angeles, is perplexed that many of the escaped Replicants he’s hunting think they are human. “How can it not know what it is?,” he says about one to the inventor.
However, the film gives subtle hints that Deckard unknowingly also is an Replicant. He has reoccurring dreams of a unicorn. At the end of the film, he picks up a small paper unicorn left for him to find, revealing that someone knows that his dreams are implants.
Misunderstood by critics when it came out, it is now ranked as one of the great science fiction films.
Below is the British Film Institue’s (BFI) modern trailer for the film.