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One of the best movies ever.
I first saw this movie when I was about ten years old. I didn't understand it much, but it somehow left an impression on me. A couple of years later I taped it when it played on tv. I rewatched this tape many, many times. A while after this I saw the director's cut without the narration, at first I didn't like this very much as it seemed to make the film much slower paced. It was also around this time that I was talking to a friend about this movie and he mentioned that in the director's cut Deckard was a replicant. This had just never occured to me before, yet it immediately seemed to make sense. After this new information became known to me I had to watch this movie yet again, looking at all the clues i'd somehow missed. This was, to me at the time, one of the most brilliant things I'd ever seen in a movie, it was like a movie with a surprise ending where they leave out the surprise ending and you sort of have to figure it out yourself.
I then read the novel on which the movie was based : "Do Androids Dream of Electric Sheep" by Philip K Dick. The novel is different in many ways, but they both somehow share a similar mood. Many of the elements of the novel are merely hinted at such as the synthetic animals, mars colonies, severe pollution and of course whether Deckard is human or replicant and his self doubt about this (by the way, I would have loved to have seen the police station scene which is in the novel on the screen, truly one of the most bizarre plot twists I have ever seen in a book or movie). Philip K Dick has since become one of my favorite authors and this is the only movie so far which truly captures the spirit of his work.
The basic theme of the movie is the question of what makes us human. In a society where technology is ever more present, man tries to make the machines(or in this case replicants) more and more human, and at the same time man becomes more machine, tracking down these human-like machines and "retiring" them without emotion. What makes the replicants less human than actual humans? According to the film and novel, it's their lack of empathy towards other living things. Yet humans feel no empathy towards the replicants and just as the replicants start to develop this empathy (towards each other at first, but eventually towards all living things) they die (replicants are designed to cease functionning after four years, around the time they start to develop emotions). When Roy Batty saves Deckard's life, he has become as human as anyone, as he recognises the value of life. What makes us human is that we care about others, not the fact that we are merely alive.
There are other philosophical, psychological and theological aspects to this film, but this is the one that affected me the most.
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