L.A., 2019. The metropolis has 400-story skyscrapers; advertisers beam their products and slogans off outdoor video billboards and blimps; the streets are jammed with traffic; the air is a mix of pollutants; the skies are cloudy with rain forecasted nearly every day. A vision of the present projected into the future? Yes, the dark side of existing trends, a dystopia of tomorrow.

Four replicants (genetically engineered humans with a four-year lifespan designed for "offworld" military and industrial labor) have escaped from an outer space colony and are at loose in the city. They are killers. Bryant (Michael Emmet Walsh), the captain of the police force, calls upon Deckard (Harrison Ford), an ex-cop and blade runner (specialists in hunting down and destroying replicants) to exterminate them. These out-of-control outcasts, it seems are worried — as is their genetic engineer — about "accelerated decreptitude" — i.e., death.

Deckard begins sleuthing with the latest police gadgetry available to him — spinners (flying cars), espers (computers that enable law officers to search environments without entering them), and fancy lie detector machines (which by measuring contractions of the iris can separate humans from replicants, who cannot supply a positive emotional response to things). In the tradition of Sam Spade, he narrates his experiences with wit and world-weariness.

During a visit with Dr. Elden Tyrell, the creator of the Nexus 6 replicants, Deckard meets his beautiful assistant Rachel (Sean Young). He tests her and discovers that she is a manufactured human. She has been programmed with someone else's memories and is shocked by his discovery. Later, she saves his life by killing one of the four outlaw replicants. Deckard finds himself falling in love with her — even though he knows what she is.

In this violent and exotic detective thriller, Rutget Hauer plays the chief replicant who stalks Deckard in the end, and William Sanderson is featured as a zany genetic engineer with a weird collection of toys. But the most interesting character in Blade Runner is the environment on the screen as imaginated by director Ridley Scott and production designer Lawrence G. Paull. Special effects supervisors Douglas Trumbull, Richard Yuricich, and David Dryer have helped make this movie exceptionally interesting on a visual level. Music by composer Vangelis is eerily compelling

Blade Runner is based on a science fiction work by Philip K. Dick titled Do Androids Dream of Electric Sheep?. Despite a rather weak storyline (the most intriguing aspect is a fresh twist on the hunter and hunted relationship), it presents a daring dystopian view of the future in the spirit of Stanley Kubrick's A Clockwork Orange and John Boorman's Zardoz. Ridley Scott (Alien) continues to impress with his out-of-the-ordinary science fiction adventures.