Blade Runner Review

Syd Mead and Lawrence Paull designed a future by accretion rather than replacement, stacking new machinery onto decaying Deco buildings, and Jordan Cronenweth lit it with hard shafts through smoke, venetian slats and perpetual rain, so every interior looks like an interrogation. Douglas Trumbull's opening flyover over the burning refinery towers still sets a standard. Vangelis supplies drifting synthesizer that treats melancholy as weather.

Rutger Hauer is the film: Roy Batty grieves, plays, terrifies and then chooses mercy, and his final speech, which he trimmed himself the night before, converts a chase into an elegy. Against that, the detective work is inert. Deckard is handed leads, absorbs beatings and shoots two women in the back, and Harrison Ford's visible disengagement gives the protagonist less interior life than the antagonist. The Rachael scenes are dramatically thin and one is genuinely ugly. What survives is the world, and it survives magnificently.