#97 ‘Blade Runner’

Neon, Noir, and the Fetishization of Existential Crisis with a Trench Coat On

Blade Runner (1982) is Ridley Scott’s rain-soaked, neon-lit fever dream of a future where the lines between man and machine are blurred—but patriarchal control, corporate dystopia, and moody white men with guns are still running on the same tired operating system. It’s beautiful, brooding, and philosophically overripe in that way sci-fi loves best: asking deep questions about humanity while ignoring the humanity of most of its characters, especially the female-coded ones.

Harrison Ford plays Rick Deckard, a “blade runner” tasked with hunting down rogue replicants—bioengineered beings who look human, think human, and most importantly, ask too many questions about their own mortality. Ford mopes through the film like a man recovering from both a hangover and an existential crisis, mumbling lines in a noir growl as if vocal fry is proof of sentience. He’s supposed to be our hero. He’s mostly a vibe in a trench coat.

Let’s be clear: Blade Runner isn’t interested in morality. It’s interested in aesthetic guilt. Everything is dark, wet, and humming with sadness. Cities have become vertical nightmares, populated by smog, synths, and the occasional geisha advertisement blown up to God-size. It’s stunning, of course. Production designer Lawrence G. Paull and cinematographer Jordan Cronenweth created a visual world so iconic it’s still being ripped off four decades later. But what’s all that beauty in service of? Mostly to frame one man’s vague ethical dilemma as revolutionary thought.

And what of the replicants? Rutger Hauer’s Roy Batty steals the film out from under Ford’s damp cynicism, giving a performance that is equal parts terrifying, tender, and transcendent. His dying monologue (“tears in rain”) is the moment Blade Runner earns its reputation: not because it answers the film’s questions, but because it admits that answers don’t matter. What matters is that he felt—and no one cared.

Now let’s talk about women. Or rather, let’s talk about the replicant Rachel (Sean Young), who is introduced as a femme fatale and quickly reduced to a philosophical punching bag. She’s elegant, trapped, and forced into “awakening” via a love story that looks disturbingly like coercion. The infamous “romantic” scene between Deckard and Rachel plays like a tutorial in power imbalance: he corners her, commands her, kisses her when she tries to leave. It's not seduction—it’s a soft-lit assault, framed like a breakthrough.

Pris (Daryl Hannah), another replicant, is styled like a post-apocalyptic cheerleader and killed off in a way that feels more aesthetic than tragic. The replicant women are either fragile dolls or feral threats—never fully people, only metaphors for male anxiety. They’re not asking what it means to be human. They’re asking permission to survive.

Ridley Scott gives us a world where humanity is defined by empathy, but only grants it to the male-coded replicants. The rest are collateral beauty. It’s telling that the most emotional, vivid character in the film is Roy Batty—while Rachel is given the emotional arc of a houseplant in a fur coat.

4 out of 5 origami unicorns
(One for the visual design that redefined sci-fi. One for Hauer’s poetic fury. One for Vangelis’s synth-soaked score. One for daring to ask if the soul is a glitch. The missing star? Vanished into the rainy void with every replicant woman whose “humanity” was only allowed to bloom when it could be controlled, kissed, or killed.)