If nothing else, Blade Runner is mesmerizing when caught in pieces it murmurs beautifully in the background. The movie’s unalloyed virtue, admired even at the time of its release, is an assaultive and wildly original production design, a mix of that rain, nuzzling gouts of smoke, and an eternally shifting kaleidoscope of artificial lights-all of it suggestive of a richly dystopic society and a wretchedly fatigued planet Earth. Blade Runner is among the first movies-if not the first-whose fortunes revived in the new channels of “ancillary distribution.” This is no accident. It may not have flattered the times, but in one sense Blade Runner benefited, and benefited enormously, from them. The prevailing meme-that over time, scales fell from prejudicial eyes, and Blade Runner’s true value as an extraordinary act of filmmaking bravado was recognized-is appealing, but also incomplete. Replicants love and die with auroral intensity we humans are the walking dead. The film pushes the unintended irony of the slogan to its maximum conclusion.

“More human than human,” crowed the corporation that designed the replicants. The humans, meanwhile, are portraits of sallow, creepy-crawly compromise: emotionally stunted, cynical, two-faced. The humanoids are godly beautiful, amoral, utterly without pity. (At the beginning of the movie, Deckard has recently quit the force, where he was a “blade runner,” a bounty hunter authorized to “retire” replicants, but he is strong-armed out of retirement.) In the second, a cop named Rick Deckard (played by Ford) tries to hunt them down and kill them. In the first, a small band of bio-engineered humanoids, called “replicants,” escape their “off-world” bondage and return to Earth in search of their designers, in an attempt to lengthen their lifespans, which have been set at four years. For those whose memory has lapsed, Blade Runner tells two parallel stories.

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