Blade Runner: Critic Reviews

Blade Runner, in all its various, shimmering incarnations, is deathless.

Open the champagne: Blade Runner is finally just the way Ridley Scott wanted it. And it only took 25 years.

The opportunity to see one of the milestone visual achievements in a big hall with a giant screen is not to be missed. And even if you saw Blade Runner in a theater in 1982, this will be an entirely new experience.

This is a seminal film, building on older classics like Metropolis or Things to Come, but establishing a pervasive view of the future that has influenced science fiction films ever since.

Ridley Scott created a triumph of retro-futuristic design over narrative or character richness.

Much of the film's erotic charge and moral and ideological ambiguity stem from the fact that these characters are very nearly the only ones we care about.

The film still represents the cutting edge of dark science fiction.

A stylistically dazzling film noir set in November 2019 in a brilliantly imagined Los Angeles marked by both technological wonders and horrendous squalor.

There are no plot-altering additions or subtractions. But the digitally spruced print is gorgeous to look at and listen to.

These days, it's almost impossible to find a gritty science fiction motion picture that doesn't owe at least a small debt to Blade Runner's visual style.

As a display terminal for the wizardry of Designers Lawrence G. Paull, Douglas Trumbull and Syd Mead, the movie delivers.

A dark, philosophical sci-fi drama. Older teens +.

...a hopelessly overrated piece of work.

For all its armor of brutalizing urban dystopia (and, boy, is there a lot of that -- you could fund a war on terror with the fog- and rain-machine budgets alone), Blade Runner has a gooey center.

It may be a quarter of a century old, but Blade Runner still seems like the future . . .

Paradoxically, Scott's crowded, misty, neon streetscape seems even murkier; fuzz I chalked up to VHS tapes is production designer Lawrence G. Paull dumping ashtrays in the air.

Probably close to being on par with Fritz Lang's Metropolis in terms of grandeur -- although of a stunningly different and far more unsettling kind.

The new version helped me see the soul because, ironically, this rendering is so much brighter. Noir or not, a film you can't see properly is a film you can't fully appreciate.

It's an overwhelming, immersive experience, a total creation of a possible future so complete that you don't need exposition to know how we got from here to there (2019).

Though it's a triumph of visual futurism and an ornament to sci-fi cinema as well as to cinema in general, I resist it on some level.

Stylistically, Blade Runner is the Citizen Kane of sci-fi movies.

Scott's film may keep us at arm's length, but it holds us, too.

Blade Runner, which does not look one bit dated, envelops us so completely in its off-kilter, near-future world.

The changes are minor, but the overall effect is a much cleaner, more logical, and more organically flowing movie.

Blade Runner has only gotten better with time. Do yourself a favor and pass over anything new in theaters and go for this old classic, it still has the power to dazzle and amaze.