I first watched Blade Runner on a cold, unremarkable February night in Brooklyn. I believe it was The Final Cut. I was 26 years old. The mid-twenties is when white men who own at least 1 Vampire Weekend album become very passionate about very generic things: craft beers, vinyl records, improv. Blade Runner falls pretty snugly amongst those things. The film itself is far from generic (if you ask me). But it’s the fandom surrounding it that can usually elicit an eye roll.
Depending on whom you ask, Blade Runner is one of the greatest science fiction films ever made or it’s the most overrated and boring. Based (loosely) on the Philip K. Dick novel Do Androids Dream of Electric Sleep?, Blade Runner is set in 2019 and follows Rick Deckard (Harrison Ford), a hardboiled, cynical detective whose expertise is finding and killing replicants — android slave labor that look, feel, and sound like human beings; they even have acquired memories programmed into them by The Tyrell Corporation — their powerful manufacturer.