Blade Runner

Capsule Film Review #21

This is the twenty-first in a series of short pieces (max. 250 words) about films. They appear weekly, in addition to my regular essays.

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In the interests of honesty, let me begin this review (which is not a review) with perhaps my most controversial film opinion. There is something wrong with Blade Runner (1982, d. Ridley Scott).

I don’t know what it is, and perhaps nobody does—least of all its director. He knows there is something wrong with it, though, which is why he has never stopped fiddling with it: there are so many versions of it kicking around because something is wrong with all of them.

But I go back to it, repeatedly, always waiting for a perfection that will never come and yet always finding, at the end of the film, its greatest moment, which seems somehow to immortalise the entire thing. I watched that moment again, while writing this. Could it be that any work of art with so extraordinary a moment must itself be great?

It seems pertinent to believe as much, on 17^th February 2026, just as it seems pertinent that the moment in question shows (of all things) an AI programme, speaking of the reality of conscious experience, testifying to his own life and personhood. That seems a hideous irony, by now, as I wonder if I myself, one day very soon, will stand before such a programme and do the same.

Perhaps it has always been true that these moments, in life as in films, will be lost like tears in rain. Perhaps their very existence, for a short time, is enough. Perhaps not.

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