Blade Runner, the Sequel that Answered the Question, and Issues with Cyberpunk and Race

Photo by Ryan Tang on Unsplash

It’s generally considered a cinematic classic. Blade Runner (1982) is one of those movies that even now elicits surprise in certain quarters if you admit you never saw it.

It’s a masterpiece of a film, visual in its imagery, and it deals with a simple science fiction concept:

Are constructed humans, well, human?

In many ways, of course, this is an analogy for racism…in an all-white movie that used, as cyberpunk is prone to do, much Asian imagery and very few Asian actors (Firefly had the same issues in a different way).

But it was also 1982, and a lot of people are willing to forgive the movie through the lens of history.

For those who have not seen it, Harrison Ford plays a Replicant Hunter, colloquially called a Blade Runner. A slave catcher, in other words. Of course, it’s justified in this case; the replicants murdered 23 people off world, stole a shuttle, and four of them are now loose on Earth.

Of course, it’s not that simple. Deckard falls in love with the replicant Rachael, an experimental model programmed with fake memories to make her believe she is human.

And it ends with the final replicant saving Deckard’s life and dying in the rain…