Hmm. On one hand, replicants would seem suited to handle dangerous and unpleasant jobs without risking real people. (The physical weakness would then be deliberate, to fool the android into thinking it’s human. All it needs to be able to do is shoot a gun, anyway.) On the other hand, in a real dystopia, human lives would be the cheapest thing in the world. Replicants are expensive, and you surely aren’t going to risk wasting one when one or four expendable humans could clean up the mess.
Why make replicants indistinguishable from humans such that they can hide in plain sight in the first place? Why do groups split up so the serial killer can knock them off one by one? Most movies are stupid if you think about them a bit.
No one said all replicants are superhuman, or have a four year lifespan. The Nexus-6 model is only four years old in 2019; Deckard’s boss did say that the shortened lifespan was designed in in response to a problem other replicants were found to have, so it’s a fairly new feature.
That kinda defeats the point of it being a “Blade Run”, i.e. someone who can walk that extremely fine line and retire replicants without killing humans. If human life is as cheap in the Blade Runner universe as it is in, say, the Futurama universe, than killing twenty humans to retire one replicant would be no big deal.
Anyway, the movie strikes as most satisfying when Deckard is a human who is gradually losing his soul while the replicants have become so advanced that they’re developing their own. That’s the compelling blurring of lines; not replicant-Deckard and the resulting need to fanwank a backstory for it.
Exactly! In the continuum of “humanity”, Deckard-the-real-human ranks below Roy-the-replicant.
Yes, the theatrical release is an awesome movie. 
Heh. The second sentence, from the replicants’ perspective, applies to Blade Runner too.
I remember going to see the director’s cut in 1992 (at Montreal’s historic Imperial Theatre, incidentally) and being somewhat baffled by it. The loss of the voice-over wasn’t that big a deal, but as I recall, the inconsistency in the number of rogue replicants (weren’t there six, three of each gender, one of whom had been killed by an electric force-field at some point?) was not corrected, and the chopping of the “fly off over the woods” ending (the objections to which I’ve never understood) left the movie without any ending at all.
I have to admit, it’d be kind of funny if all the characters in a slasher movie were martial arts experts. They split up and individually, each of them is attacked by the killer and beats the shit out of him. The killer only manages to murder the characters through luck or the intervention of third parties.
By the end, the last survivor (a girl, probably) saves the life of the killer because by then he is so smashed up that she feels kind of sorry for him.
I know the book and movie are extremely different. But Deckard’s being human is a major point in the book and I watched the original movie with that in mind. It appears Ridley Scott never read it or ignored that point. So be it. As far as I’m concerned his “final director’s cut” is crap, and if that’s the version this sequel is launching from, then I’m out. No film tickets, no Blu-ray, and most likely no soundtrack purchase.
Come to think of it, though… It’s possible that Deckard is hunted down as a replicant, while still leaving the point ambiguous. Who would be hunting him? Blade runners, presumably. And how do you get a blade runner to hunt down a dangerous target that you want eliminated? By telling him that the target as replicant, whether it’s true or not.
The whole thing comes from a comical (except for the result) misunderstanding on Scott’s part of something screenwriter Hampton Fancher said. Fancher was describing the theme of the movie, as he saw it, and described how Deckard was contemplating his maker (i.e. God), meaning both Deckard and the Replicants* were searching for meaning in their lives through their shared search for where they come from. Scott interpreted that to mean Fancher was proposing that Deckard was a Replicant, and ran with it.
I always picture that day as Scott literally running off with it, leaving poor Fancher standing alone in the hallway, calling after the retreating Scott, “Wait…stop!”, but it was too late. And now we have inserted unicorn dreams and 50% of the fan base being in the wrong. ()
*Band name!
That sounds like a pretty good concept for serial-killer spoof! Get me Hollywood on the phone…
There’s no real way to avoid spoilage on this, but for fans of the replicant-Deckard concept, I suggest they watch another Philip K. Dick movie adaptation, Impostor.
[spoiler]In 2079, Earth is at war with Alpha Centauri, and the Centaurans have implemented a new weapon - androids that are virtually indistinguishable from the people they are replacing, and indeed not even aware they are androids, until they are discovered or reach their targets, when a bomb magically-ish appears in their chest cavities and explodes. Spencer Olham (Gary Sinise) is arrested by Major Hathaway (Vincent D’Onofrio) and accused of being such an android. Olham escapes and spends much of the movie on the run, trying desperately to prove he’s human by sneaking into a hospital where his wife Maya (Madeleine Stowe) works to get a full-body scan, but the result is interrupted and inconclusive.
Olham and Maya are pursued to a forest where they spent a romantic weekend a few days earlier and find a crashed alien spaceship. Shocking twist! Inside the ship is Maya’s corpse! Maya is the killer robot! Hathaway shoots her before she can self-detonate. Phew! Another shocking twist! Inside the ship is also Olham’s corpse! He’s also an android!!! He blows up with the force of a small nuke, killing himself and Hathaway and probably everyone within a mile radius (which made me wonder why he had to get “close” to his target in the first place, but no matter).[/spoiler]
I watched this movie in a near-empty theater with friends and we just laughed at the sheer absurdity of the ending, even though two hours of our lives had just been wasted.
Deckard is not a replicant! He has none of the super human qualities of one( he gets hurt easily by all of them that he hunts ), and a firm handle on his emotions, something that replicants in their 4-year life cycle never fully comprehend.
Harrison Ford, by the way, had some issues with the movie and doesn’t like to talk about it. For instance, he hated the idea of the narrative in this movie, but I think it added to the film.
The movie remains a master piece of science fiction, which sometimes get lost in the extreme violence, horror, and fantastically dreary sound track of the movie.
Had a chance to talk with someone very closely connected to the movie. He told me that the production team and Denis Villeneuve were fans of the ambiguity of the original. Left me hopeful.
There’s no ambiguity in the original. The point of the original is NOT that Deckard may be a replicant, it’s that the replicants were as human as he was. Changing it so he was a replicant ruins the whole point.
The very first time I watched it, and the voice over started in, I went “what’s with the hard-boiled detective shit?” But it grew on me, and if I watch the director’s cut, I miss it. It may be heavy handed, even trite, but it clears up some points. And, makes it more noirish. I hadn’t seen many noir films before I watched Blade Runner, and did not understand how they worked.
There’s no ambiguity to Scott, either. Trouble is just that he’s unambiguous the wrong way. 
For those who have never read it, I suggest you read Future Noir: The Making of Blade Runner. It’s a great book.
He’s actually only unambiguous in his last Directors cut. Which is crappy anyway.
Judging by this thread, no one really knows for absolute sure whether Deckard in the film is a replicant (or else there would be nothing to argue about), and ultimately there is no difference between replicants and natural humans, which was Dick’s point. (As for strength/intelligence/life expectancy, that is just a matter of engineering, and why not modify humans while you’re at it?) I doubt it, but it would not come as a huge surprise, if the new film introduces a plot twist like discovering half the population of L.A. are replicants, or at least something similar on a smaller scale.
Yes, the author knows for sure and I know for sure that Deckard is not a replicant. There dont seem to be many here that think he is. Only the fucking stupid shit director think he is, and that is because he is too fucking stupid to understand what point Philip K. Dick was trying to make. *The point is that the replicants are just as human as Deckard.
*
I, too, like Deckard’s world-weary voiceover for those very reasons.