"It’s not just that Harrison Ford looks dashing in neo-noir future wear or that the lighting is always moody and perfect, as if the entire city had been converted into a sultry nightclub — though none of that hurts. It’s that Blade Runner presents its futuristic city as one that is overrun by the liveliness of mass humanity. Its bustling sci-fi cityscape is defined by diversity and walkability, by commerce and cultural mixing, by industrial ingenuity and panoramas of larger-than-life advertising. Even as the city is dying, it teems with the business of life. The combination of realism and romanticism makes the movie’s 2019 Los Angeles a place you can imagine not only going to but wanting to visit."

"Blade Runner is a big-budget mood piece, an existential tone poem about the precarious nature of humanity and its relationship to the planet, set in one of the most elaborately constructed and imagined futures ever put on film. Watch any of Blade Runner’s street scenes, and it’s immediately apparent how much work went into creating its near-future Los Angeles. Director Ridley Scott’s shots are densely packed, nearly cluttered, with information: old cars outfitted with industrial odds and ends; flying vehicles with blinking monitors; graffiti-covered video payphones; storefronts with blaring neon signs competing for your attention; bands of strangely dressed people carrying umbrellas lit from the handles; video advertising, some of it vaguely menacing, plastered everywhere. Dirt and smog and steam coat everything."

"Blade Runner always raised far more questions, literal and cosmological, than it answered, glibly presenting us with a complex and mysterious vision of our future selves, telling us only the scraps we needed to know to follow a plot about a detective who must find and kill the 21st Century equivalent of illegal aliens-so-called replicants, robots so sophisticated they can pass for humans."

"You want an accounting, not a whodunnit but a what-got-dun? Blade Runner got the computerized parking meters right, and the talking streetlights. (“Cross now … cross now … don’t walk … don’t walk.”) Robot Metrokabs? So close. Streetside newsstands carrying an array of glossy magazines? Yeah, about that. Face-recognizing polygraphs? Check your phone’s forward-facing camera. We enhance digital photographs, and we have voice-controlled gadgets in our kitchens. Billionaires promise a life off-world of excitement and adventure, but we don’t even have billboard dirigibles, much less reliable rockets."

"People tend to classify my movies as cyberpunk fictions but I personally don't think they are. There are some films that I really enjoy such as Blade Runner, and they may have been helpful in shaping my movies to a certain degree. When you create a film dealing with humans and cyborgs, you have no choice but to refer back to Ridley Scott's Blade Runner, as this movie is probably the foundation of movies with this theme. Whether I'm trying to re-appropriate his language or not may not apply to my movies, because my goal is to always make a new movie that nobody has ever seen before. I think I've proven that with Innocence."

"It is a starkly empty film, preoccupied as it is with the thought that people themselves might be hollow. The plot depends on the notion that the replicants must be allowed to live no longer than four years, because as time passes they begin to develop raw emotions. Why emotion should be a capital offence is never sufficiently explained; but it is of a piece with the film’s investigation of a flight from feeling – what psychologist Ian D Suttie once named the “taboo on tenderness”. Intimacy here is frightful (everyone appears to live alone), especially that closeness that suggests that the replicants might be indistinguishable from us. This anxiety may originally have had tacit political resonances. In the novel that the film is based on, Philip K Dick’s thoughtful Do Androids Dream of Electric Sheep? (1968), the dilemma of the foot soldier plays out, commanded to kill an adversary considered less human than ourselves, yet troubled by the possibility that the enemy are in fact no different. Shades of Vietnam darken the story, as well as memories of America’s slave-owning past. We are told that the replicants can do everything a human being can do, except feel empathy. Yet how much empathy do we feel for faraway victims or inconvenient others?"

"In the context of science fiction, Deckard is the rare existential sci-fi hero. His claims to heroism are not that of a fantasy character like Superman but of an ordinary man confronted with a situation in which he may either escape or be seduced by his environment, and whose testament of courage is that he does not resign himself to the mo-rose life of his contemporaries. Having been nurtured by a pessimistic environment, Deckard manages to rise above the dreariness and corruption of his world and es-cape the suffocating influences of the future Los Angeles, while rescuing the hunted woman he loves Since "Blade Runner" is a study of the individual's emptiness in the face of his society, Deckard succeeds in doing what few characters in Hollywood science fiction have done: He outgrows his futuristic, technologically-awesome world and reestablishes his worth as a human being (or, if you will, a replicant), something which, though not as spectacular as defeating a squadron of invading aliens or slaying a monster, is nonetheless just as triumphant –and, in a dystopian future, something even harder to accomplish."

"The end of the film is both gruesome and sentimental. Mr. Scott can't have it both ways, any more than he can expect overdecoration to carry a film that has neither strong characters nor a strong story. That hasn't stopped him from trying, even if it perhaps should have."

"At several points in the story, Deckard is called on to wonder whether Rachael has feelings. This seems peculiar, because the icy, poised Rachael, played by Sean Young as a 1940's heroine with spaceage trimmings, seems a lot more expressive than Deckard, who is played by Harrison Ford. Mr. Ford is, for a movie so darkly fanciful, rather a colorless hero; he fades too easily into the bleak background. And he is often upstaged by Rutger Hauer, who in this film and in Night Hawks appears to be specializing in fiendish roles. Mr. Hauer is properly cold-blooded here, but there is something almost humorous behind his nastiness. In any case, he is by far the most animated performer in a film intentionally populated by automatons."

"THE view of the future offered by Ridley Scott's muddled yet mesmerizing Blade Runner is as intricately detailed as anything a science-fiction film has yet envisioned. The year is 2019, the place Los Angeles, the landscape garish but bleak. The city is a canyon bounded by industrial towers, some of which belch fire. Advertising billboards, which are everywhere, now feature lifelike electronic people who are the size of giants. The police cruise both horizontally and vertically on their patrol routes, but there is seldom anyone to arrest, because the place is much emptier than it used to be. In an age of space travel, anyone with the wherewithal has presumably gone away. Only the dregs remain."

"“Today we use WhatsApp or FaceTime or whatever program you use to make video calls but in the movie they predicted people would go to video-phone booths,” he said. “So although the movie seemed quite advanced at the time and we are yet to get to some of its predictions, in other ways we’ve actually surpassed where the movie thought we would be.”"

"In 1982, the movie Blade Runner envisaged the then far-off future world of November 2019 as being filled with lifelike androids, neon-drenched cities and ubiquitous flying cars. But November 2019 has arrived, and the future looks very different from the sci-fi noir prediction."

"Gaff had been there, and let her live. Four years, he figured. He was wrong. Tyrell had told me Rachael was special: no termination date. I didn't know how long we had together... who does?"

"I don't know why he saved my life. Maybe in those last moments he loved life more than he ever had before. Not just his life... anybody's life... my life. All he'd wanted was the same answers the rest of us want. Where do I come from? Where am I going? How long have I got? All I could do is sit there and watch him die."

"The report would be "routine retirement of a Replicant", which didn't make me feel any better about shooting a woman in the back. There it was again... feeling in myself... for her... for Rachael."

"Leon's pictures had to be as phony as Rachael's. I didn't know why a Replicant would collect photos. Maybe they were like Rachael... they needed memories."

"Tyrell really did a job on Rachael. Right down to a snapshot of a mother she never had... a daughter she never was. Replicants weren't supposed to have feelings... neither were blade runners. What the hell was happening to me?"

"And family photos? Replicants didn't have families either."

"Whatever was in the bathtub was not human. Replicants don't have scales."

"I didn't know whether Leon gave Holden a legit address. But it was the only lead I had, so I checked it out."

"I'd quit because I'd had a belly full of killing. But then I'd rather be a killer than a victim, and that's exactly what Bryant's threat about "little people" meant. So I hooked in once more thinking if I couldn't take it I'd split later. I didn't have to worry about Gaff. He was brown-nosing for a promotion, so he didn't want me around anyway."

""Skin jobs". That's what Bryant called Replicants. In history books he's the kind of cop who used to call black men "niggers"."

"The charmer's name was Gaff, I'd seen him around. Bryant must have upped him to the Blade Runner unit. That gibberish he talked was city speak, gutter talk. A mishmash of Japanese, Spanish, German, what have you. I didn't really need a translator, I knew the lingo, every good cop did. But I wasn't going to make it easier for him."

"Sushi. That's what my ex-wife used to call me. "Cold fish.""

"They don't advertise for killers in the newspaper. That was my profession. Ex-cop. Ex-blade runner. Ex-killer."

"I've had people walk out on me before, but not when I was being so charming."

"[Revealing to Rachael that she is a replicant] You ever tell anyone that? Your mother, Tyrell? They're implants. Those aren't your memories, they're somebody else's. They're Tyrell's niece's. Okay, bad joke, I'm sorry... No, really, I made a bad joke. Go home, you're not a Replicant... (sigh) you wanna drink? I'll get you a drink."

"Replicants are like any other machine. They're either a benefit or a hazard. If they're a benefit, it's not my problem."

"I was quit when I came in here. I'm twice as quit now."

"I'm Deckard. Blade Runner. B Two sixty-three fifty-four. I'm filed and monitored."

"You’re in a desert walking along in the sand when all of the sudden you look down, and you see a tortoise. It’s crawling toward you. You reach down. You flip the tortoise over on its back. The tortoise lays on its back, its belly baking in the hot sun, beating its legs trying to turn itself over but it can’t — not without your help. But you’re not helping. Why is that?"

"PA Voice: A new life awaits you in the Off-World colonies. The chance to begin again in a golden land of opportunity and adventure!"

"It's too bad she won't live. But then again, who does?"

"You've done a man's job, sir!"

"I've seen things you people wouldn't believe. Attack ships on fire off shoulder of Orion. I watched c-beams glitter in the dark near the Tannhäuser Gate. All those moments will be lost in time, like tears in rain. Time to die."

"Quite an experience to live in fear, isn't it? That's what it is to be a slave."

"Fiery the angels fell; deep thunder rolled around their shores; burning with the fires of Orc."

"Painful to live in fear, isn't it? Nothing is worse than having an itch you can never scratch. Wake up! Time to die!"

"Is this testing whether I'm a Replicant or a lesbian, Mr. Deckard?"

"Talk about beauty and the beast — she's both."

"Stop right where you are! You know the score, pal! If you're not cop, you're little people."

"I watched him die all night. It was a long, slow thing... and he fought it all the way. He never whimpered, and he never quit. He took all the time he had, as though he loved life very much. Every second of it... even the pain. Then, he was dead."

"Go back to Jersey, sonny. This is the city of the angels and you haven't got any wings."

"You may well reap the benefit, Edmund, but are you truly prepared to be despised within the department?"

"(after Bud sees pictures of Ed with Lynn) I wouldn't trade places with Edmund Exley right now for all the whiskey in Ireland."

"David Strathairn - Pierce Patchett"

"Danny DeVito - Sid Hudgens"

"James Cromwell - Capt. Dudley Smith"

"Kevin Spacey - Jack Vincennes"

"Kim Basinger - Lynn Bracken"