The Most Important Cyberpunk Movie Ever Is Back On Netflix

These days, pointing out that Blade Runner is good is like pointing out that ice cream is tasty; most people have heard by now, and odds are they agree with you. But we tend to take the positives in our lives for granted, so now that the sci-fi classic is available on Netflix, it wouldn’t hurt to refresh our fragile memories.

Director Ridley Scott has a long and august filmography, and the 87-year-old has made it clear he wants to get as many new films out the door as he can before his final curtain call. That’s an understandable attitude considering he was a bit of a late bloomer. It’s easy to forget now, but Blade Runner was only Scott’s third film, and he was already 45 when he made it. After half a lifetime in commercials and lost BBC TV shows, Scott won critical acclaim with The Duellists, then dodged the dreaded sophomore slump with a little sci-fi film called Alien.

Alien changed genre filmmaking forever, which made it a bit of a tough act to follow. Scott’s first plan was actually to move on to an adaptation of Dune, if you’d like to take a moment to imagine that alternate reality. But he pivoted to Blade Runner, a project he’d previously shot down, in the wake of losing his brother Frank to cancer, as he thought the faster moving production would busy his grieving mind.

The making of Blade Runner is a story in itself (if you’d like to ponder another alternate timeline, know that Martin Scorsese briefly explored adapting the source novel back in 1969), but when it finally hit American theatres in June 1982, critics and audiences boldly declared, “Eh, that was okay.” Mis-marketed as a rip-roaring adventure, infamously saddled with voiceover narration from a somnambulant Harrison Ford at the behest of a studio that thought the plot would confuse dunderheaded viewers, and crushed by E.T. at the box office, Blade Runner seemed destined to be remembered as pretty but a bit empty-headed.

For the benefit of those still somehow unfamiliar, Blade Runner is set in the grimy future of 2019, where the omnipresent Tyrell Corporation has perfected animal and human “replicants,” short-lived artificial beings visually indistinguishable from their flesh-and-blood inspiration. Replicants are used for forced labour and sex work on off-world colonies, but their tendency to rebel against their condition has made them forbidden on Earth. When four rogue replicants slip into Los Angeles anyway, Rick Deckard (Harrison Ford), a specialised cop trying to get out of the business, is tasked with finding and “retiring” them. You can puzzle out the euphemism for yourself.

Legendary critic Pauline Kael seemed to capture the general consensus when she called Blade Runner a “visionary sci-fi movie” for its look, while dismissing the futuristic Los Angeles and its characters as “so dehumanized that their life or death hardly matters.” It came and went from theatres with only a few technical awards to show for it, and in the short term, Scott made bigger waves two years later with his much-parodied commercial for the Apple Macintosh.

Kael’s conclusion is a reasonable one, but all these years later, Blade Runner persists because enough viewers do see something human in it. Oh, sure, Scott’s portrayal of a futuristic Los Angeles is iconic for its flying cars, rainy streets, and towering advertisements, traits that have influenced everything from Ghost in the Shell and Cyberpunk 2077 to Rob Zombie and the nefarious cybertruck. But the reason we’re excited it’s back on Netflix while so many of its imitators have been forgotten is that it asks us to consider how someone retains their humanity in an increasingly anti-human world.

We may not be flying our cars through pillars of fire to get to our jobs at the replicant factory, but the cold indifference of 2019 Los Angeles is exactly why it’s so gripping. Who hasn’t felt puny and unremarkable in the face of impersonal corporate power and scary stories of a changing climate? All Deckard and the supposedly inhuman replicants he pursues can do is keep trudging through the rain in search of shelter anyway. It’s not the most inspirational message ever delivered, but it's an honest one.

Decades after its release, Blade Runner has received so many retroactive accolades that we don’t have room to list them. That success has led to a sequel, video games, animated shorts, and TV series, including the upcoming Blade Runner 2099, featuring Michelle Yeoh as an aging replicant, that Scott has a hand in. Like Star Wars, however, the original is best appreciated in isolation as an intense and singular vision from a hungry creator. For a movie that warns us how little our memories count for against the grand sweep of the future, it sure will stick with you.

Blade Runner: The Final Cut is now streaming on Netflix.