Blade Runner (1982)

1992 Director's Cut
Directed by Ridley Scott

the following contains spoilers.

WHAT I WAS EXPECTING
In the future, Harrison Ford is a detective. There are flying cars and video-screen billboards on sky scrapers. Everyone behaves like they are in an old-timey 1940s film noir. The detective is caught up in a case involving very life-like robots. As he investigates, he encounters fetching femme fatales and has run ins with spiky-haired punks in seedy Asian bars. Harrison Ford is probably a robot too but it's ambiguous.

Starring Harrison Ford, Sean Young and Harrison Ford's gun wielding twin

REACTIONS
Before watching, I was unaware that when the film was first released it was a flop. I only knew how unanimously praised it is today. Back in 1982, however, it apparently alienated audiences and polarized critics. It eventually became a cult favorite and is now critically adored.

Not to mention its influence on hair styling.

First impressions, I'm siding with the 80's audience. The film started well but the more it went on the less I liked it. In theory, I should have loved this film.The science fiction premise was well established. The world was visual impressive and immersive.  The film seemed to be layered with symbolism, analogy and homage. However, it very difficult to appreciate any of this when I wasn't enjoying the story itself.
The chief culprit was the pacing. Every scene moved at exactly the same glacier pace. Even what was supposed to be an action scene, when Harrison Ford chases Snake Lady around, played out in slow motion.

And don't get me started on world's most awkward love scene

I understand that the genre is a film noir and hence the reason for the constant darkness, fog, smoke and rain but after a while I couldn't take it any more. As the last hour crawled by, I just wanted the film to be over.  The film's focus switched from Deckard and was suddenly all about Roy the Replicant, a character I didn't care about. The bizarreness was ramped up as as Roy chased Decker around, howling like a wolf. Also, the violence became increasingly grotesque. The final scenes featured more finger snapping than an open-mic poetry reading. As for Roy's final monologue, I know it was supposed to be poetic and profound, but by that point I had already checked out and it all sounded like babble.

Don't worry, Harrison Ford. I had the same reaction.

I was curious if I was the only one who wasn't a fan of the film and then I found this comment on Youtube.

So who knows, maybe I'll come around one of these days.

One note about the whole Deckard Replicant debate: I have no way of knowing what I would have thought if it hadn't been spoiled for me already. In the cut I saw (Director's Cut, not Final Cut), I thought it was very heavily implied that Deckard was a Replicant, especially when he is asked if he's done the test on himself. The other clue was that he had surrounded himself with old photographs.


REFERENCES EVERYWHERE!
My personal enjoyment aside, there's no discounting the influence of this film. It pretty much created it's own genre: Cyber Punk Neo-Noir Action Sci-fi.

Recognizable by its use of flying police cars

Films more or less in this genre include Total Recall (1990 or 2012), The Fifth Element (1997), Dark City (1998)  and Minority Report (2002). Fun fact: Blade Runner, Total Recall and Minority Report were all adapated from stories by the same author, Philip K. Dick. 

Blade Runner's strongest influence over these films is their production design. Many of them feature cities that replicate Future Los Angeles' fusion of Sci-fi tech and urban immensity.

However, none of the cities in those films look as much like Blade Runner's as the city planet of Coruscant, featured in the Star Wars prequels.

Not to be confused with the pastry planet Croissant

As portrayed in Star Wars Episode II: Attack of the Clones, Coruscant has it all: mile-high skyscrapers, flying vehicles, cuzzy neon-lit bars and even those flaming smokestacks.

The parallels are even more direct in the cancelled LucasArts video game Star Wars 1313, which was to take place in the below-ground underbelly of the city.