(Norwegian.)

“Los Angles, 2019.” Thus begins what I would describe as one of the best famous sci-fi movies of all time. Dystopic, philosophical, thrilling — “Blade Runner” (director’s cut) is all that, and more.

“Los Angeles, 2019.” Four androids of the mark Nexus 6, or Replicants, perfect imitations of humans but for a four-year life span as well as some “improvements”, have escaped from an Off-world colony. They’ve come to a dilipidated Earth in search of their maker, in the hopes that they’ll be able to coerce him into extending their longevity. The human authorites, however, see them as dangerous terrorists, and send a retired Blade Runner — a professional Replicant hunter — named Rick Deckard to “retire” them. Along the way he also runs into Rachael, a Replicant who believes she is a human being, as Dr. Tyrell, the Replicant maker, has inserted his niece’s memories into her brain.

This all makes for an amazingly rich story. The look of future Los Angeles is more like a noir version of New York than our usual imiage of sunny LA: It’s dark, it’s rainy, it’s crowded, and it’s decadent. (Well, that last one is probably part of the mental image most of have of LA, but you get the point.) The sets, which are all built, either as models as or ordinary sets, are so detailed and so painstakingly alive, that one almost gets the feeling of beeing where the action takes place, and it all feels so much more real than any CGI set I can remember seeing.

The sets help to further the feeling the viewer gets that we have seriously fucked up the environment in addition to society, and the plot itself expands on this. The film’s filled with a sense of moral ambiguity, where you never wuite know who the good guys are, and personally, I had to conclude that no one really were good or bad; practically everyone were both. Deckard, for example, followed orders and exterminated robot terrorists, but I never really got the impression that he did the right thing, and neither did he, I think. After all, he was hunting and killing creatures so alike us in both physical and mental appearance that it might as well not have been there. And the Replicants, on the other hand, what about them? They were created by humans, and they had done some pretty horrible things to get to Earth, but were these things really more horrible than the ones that had been done to them? They’d been grown, cultivated as cheap (slave) labour, to do the jobs normal humans couldn’t cope with. They were perfect copies of humans, but they didn’t have any emotions to begin with, as emotions reduced humanity’s control over them. And because these emotions inevitably emerged within their psyche, they weren’t allowed to live for more than four years. Then you have Rachael, the Replicant who didn’t even know that she was one — she had memories, emotions, opinions, a feeling of self — and yet Deckard was ordered to hunt her down and “retire” her. Weren’t they right to rebel? And when the Replicants had reached the stage that Rachael had: What real differences were there between her and an ordinary woman?

As you can probably understand, these androids have an abundance of potential interpretations latent in them. They can be understood as a social metaphor for oppressed people, and then perhaps especially a working class (although this metaphor might be more vaild from a 19th century perspective). Or they can be interpreted as a metaphor for humanity’s responsibility for the sciences and the technologies we develop. Just to mention a couple.

As a bonus, Vangelis’ score is far better than I had feared, and the whole package made me want to read “Do Androids Dream of Electric Sheep”.

Before watching it, I was worried that the film was gonna be a disappointment, and so I lowered my expectations a little. But I don’t think there was a need for that, really. Because this is some of the best stuff I have seen in a while. Or at least good enough for a 10/10.