Blade Runner explained in one paragraph: Ridley Scott's 1982 film sends a worn out Los Angeles cop called Rick Deckard after four escaped bioengineered workers, then spends two hours quietly asking whether he is one of them. It opened on 25 June 1982, it is set in Los Angeles in November 2019, and the fugitives are Nexus 6 replicants built with a fixed four year lifespan. Almost everything else in the film grows out of that deadline.
I have watched this film on stop and start, scene by scene, in order to draw it, so what follows is the version I ended up with after plotting every beat onto a grid. It covers the plot, the production, the versions and the predictions in one place. You can see the finished artwork on the Blade Runner plot map art print.
Who made Blade Runner, and where did the story come from?
Ridley Scott directed it. The screenplay is by Hampton Fancher and David Peoples, adapted loosely from Philip K. Dick's 1968 novel Do Androids Dream of Electric Sheep?. Loosely is the word that matters. The novel's mood survives, along with the empathy test and the artificial animals, but the plot on screen is largely its own thing.
Syd Mead designed the Spinner vehicles and much of the hardware. Jordan Cronenweth shot it, and won a BAFTA for the cinematography. Vangelis wrote the score. Those four names carry more of the film's meaning than the dialogue does, which is part of why it can feel hard to follow on a first viewing.
Where and when is Blade Runner set?
Los Angeles, November 2019. The city is overcrowded, permanently wet and lit almost entirely by advertising. Off world colonies have drawn away anyone with the health and money to leave, so what remains at street level is the people who could not go.
The design idea underneath it is retrofitting: new technology bolted onto old buildings rather than replacing them. That is why the Bradbury Building, a real Los Angeles landmark completed in 1893, can hold a scene about synthetic humans without the film blinking.
Who are the replicants, and what does a blade runner actually do?
Replicants are bioengineered people manufactured by the Tyrell Corporation for off world labour. The Nexus 6 generation is stronger and faster than the humans who made them, and is given a four year lifespan as a safety measure, because a longer life would let them develop their own emotional responses.
A blade runner hunts down replicants who return to Earth illegally and kills them, in a piece of language the film uses deliberately: they are retired, not murdered. Deckard is pulled out of retirement himself to chase Roy Batty, Pris, Zhora and Leon, who have come back looking for a way to extend their lives.
How the Voight-Kampff test works
The Voight-Kampff machine measures involuntary reactions, pupil movement, blush response, respiration and heart rate, while the subject is asked questions designed to provoke an emotional reaction. It is not an intelligence test. It is an empathy test.
That choice is the whole film in miniature. The thing the machine looks for is the one quality the human characters keep failing to show, and by the end the replicants are grieving their own dead while the people hunting them are not.
Blade Runner explained as a transit map
Films like this one are the reason I started drawing plot maps. On my music maps a line is a credited musician. On a film map a line is a character, and it runs through every scene that character appears in, with each scene sitting in its own grid square so a place can be found rather than a running time.
Deckard is the trunk route, and his is the only line that touches almost every other one. Roy Batty's runs the other way, hunting for more life rather than for people. Rachael, Pris, Leon and Zhora each get their own line, and each of those lines ends where Deckard's crosses it. Eldon Tyrell and J.F. Sebastian sit at either end of the same short branch, which is the tidiest piece of structure in the film. Gaff threads quietly through the whole diagram as an observer, marked by the origami he leaves behind.
The thing that surprised me while plotting it was how little screen time some of the most memorable characters actually have. Zhora and Pris both run as short lines, and both leave a mark out of all proportion to their length. Drawn flat, the film is also far tighter than it feels while you are watching it. If you want the station by station walkthrough, I wrote one up in how to read the Blade Runner plot map.
Is Deckard a replicant?
This is the question the film will not close, and the map is quite good at showing why. Deckard dreams of a unicorn in the later cuts. At the end, Gaff leaves an origami unicorn outside Deckard's door. If Gaff knows the dream, the dream is on file, and if the dream is on file then it was implanted.
Ridley Scott has said plainly that he intended Deckard to be a replicant. Harrison Ford has argued the opposite, on the grounds that the audience needs one human to hold on to. Neither reading breaks the film, and on the map both hang on a single small intersection near the end of Deckard's line, which is exactly where the evidence sits.
Why the film failed in 1982
It underperformed on release and the reviews were split. Critics admired the look and complained about the pace. Sheila Benson in the Los Angeles Times called it "Blade Crawler". It also arrived three weeks after E.T. the Extra-Terrestrial, the highest grossing film of the year and the exact emotional opposite of a wet, slow film about whether empathy can be manufactured. There was no version of that summer where Blade Runner won.
Home video is what saved it. It was added to the National Film Registry in 1993, and it now turns up on every list of the films that changed what science fiction looks like.
The making of Blade Runner, in five parts
The production was, by most accounts of it, a bad time for nearly everyone involved. Five things from it stay with me.
1. The release date came down to a superstition
The 25 June date is usually put down to Alan Ladd Jr, whose company financed the film and who is said to have treated the 25th of the month as lucky. Star Wars had opened on 25 May 1977 and Alien on 25 May 1979, both of them Ladd releases, both of them enormous. The 25th did not repeat the trick.
2. The voiceover was forced on Harrison Ford
Preview audiences were confused, so the studio asked for narration to explain the plot and a hopeful ending to close it. Ford recorded the voiceover under protest and has said since that he thought it was bad. The happy ending is the odder detail: the final shots of Deckard and Rachael driving through open country were assembled from aerial footage shot for Stanley Kubrick's The Shining and never used in it. A film about the manufacture of false memories ended with a borrowed one.
3. The set had an actual T-shirt war
The shoot ran long and tempers went with it. After Scott was quoted comparing American crews unfavourably with British ones, the crew turned up in shirts reading "Yes Guv'nor, My Ass". Scott's reply was a shirt of his own: "Xenophobia Sucks". The film's reputation for being coldly perfect hides how contested every frame of it was.
4. Vangelis, the Yamaha CS-80, and a saxophone that mostly is not there
Vangelis scored the film on a Yamaha CS-80, a polyphonic analogue synthesiser with pressure sensitive keys that let a player bend and swell a note the way a wind instrument does. That is what makes "Blade Runner Blues" sound like a saxophone in an empty room when there is no saxophone in it. There is a real one, though: the tenor saxophone on the "Love Theme" was played by Dick Morrissey.
5. Seven versions, and which one to watch
Most films have one version. Seven of this one are generally counted, including the 1982 workprint, the San Diego sneak preview, the US and international theatrical cuts, a televised version, the 1992 Director's Cut and the 2007 Final Cut.
The 1992 cut removed the narration and the borrowed ending and put back the unicorn dream. The 2007 Final Cut is the only version Ridley Scott controlled from start to finish, and it is the one to watch first. This is also the part of the story that made the film hard to map, and the reason my plot map follows the beats the major cuts share rather than committing to a single edit.
The Blade Runner curse
Fans have long enjoyed the idea of a Blade Runner curse. Several of the brands that paid for product placement in the film did run into serious trouble not long after: Atari's business collapsed in the video game crash of 1983, the Bell System was broken up in 1984, RCA was dismantled after its 1986 sale, and Pan Am stopped flying in 1991.
The neat reading is that a film about corporate rot took its sponsors down with it. The duller reading is that 1982 was simply a bad moment to be a large American consumer brand. I like the story, but it belongs in the legend column rather than the evidence one.
What Blade Runner got right about 2019
The real 2019 arrived without Spinners. Look past the hardware, though, and the film's guesses about climate, cities, screens and corporate power hold up better than almost any science fiction of its era.
| Prediction | Accuracy today | How it appears in the film |
|---|---|---|
| Climate change and environmental decay | Yes | Constant rain, smog and a city with no natural life left in it. Living animals have become status objects. |
| Advertising screens at building scale | Yes | Electronic billboards running the height of skyscrapers, and a blimp selling the colonies. |
| Video calling | Yes | Deckard calls Rachael from a VidPhon booth, a video screen bolted into an old payphone. |
| Corporate monopolies | Yes | Tyrell operates across aerospace, military technology and genetics, with no visible government above it. |
| Retrofitted cities | Yes | Syd Mead's reasoning was that nobody demolishes a skyscraper when it is cheaper to bolt new ductwork onto the outside of an old one. |
| Genetic engineering and synthetic humans | Partly | Tyrell bio-engineers replicants for off world labour, tested for empathy by the Voight-Kampff machine. |
| Artificial animals | Partly | Synthetic snake scales, Tyrell's owl, and J.F. Sebastian as a maker of artificial companions. |
| Flying cars | No | Spinners flown by police and by the wealthy, marking the divide between above and below. |
| Memory implants | No | Rachael is given a relative's memories as an emotional cushion, and the unicorn dream raises the same question about Deckard. |
What is not on the map
The map charts the 1982 film only. Blade Runner 2049 is not on it, and neither are the short films made around that sequel, the deleted material or the alternative endings. It follows the beats common to the major cuts rather than picking one version and excluding the others, so it holds up whichever edit you know best.
Sizes, paper and framing
The print is a Giclée on 230gsm premium fine art paper with a textured matte finish, archival and acid-free. It is landscape, in two sizes: A2 at 594 x 420 mm (23 x 16 in) and A1 at 841 x 594 mm (33 x 23 in). For buyers in the USA there are 24 x 18 in and 36 x 24 in equivalents.
Every size comes either unframed, from £42, or ready to hang in a black wood frame. The full paper and frame detail is on the print specifications page.
Related film plot maps
Two films sit close to this one in the way they are built. The Shining plot map has the same problem of a story that is mostly atmosphere, and rewards being drawn flat for the same reason. The Jaws plot map is the opposite case, a film with such clean structure that the diagram almost draws itself. The Back to the Future plot map is the tightest script of the three.
Blade Runner questions I am asked most
How long is Blade Runner?
It depends on the cut. The 2007 Final Cut runs to roughly 117 minutes, and the 1982 theatrical version is a few minutes shorter with the voiceover in place.
Which version should I watch first?
The Final Cut. It is the one Ridley Scott signed off on, and it is the version most conversations about the film assume.
Did Rutger Hauer really write the "tears in rain" speech?
He cut it down rather than wrote it from nothing. Hauer has said he stripped the scripted version back on the night, removing the wider references and leaving the closing image, which is the line everyone can quote.
Is the Vangelis soundtrack the one that came out in 1982?
No. An orchestral re-recording came out in 1982 and Vangelis's own score was not officially released until 1994, which is part of why the music took so long to get the credit it now has.
Why is the film's 2019 nothing like the real 2019?
Science fiction of that era was extrapolating from 1981, not forecasting. What the film did get right was the texture: screens everywhere, corporate branding at civic scale and a climate that has clearly gone wrong.
Which characters have their own line on the map?
Deckard, Roy Batty, Rachael, Gaff, Pris, Leon, Zhora, J.F. Sebastian and Eldon Tyrell each get a colour of their own, with Captain Bryant and Hannibal Chew running shorter routes.
Is the map hand drawn?
Yes. I plot every scene myself from repeated viewings, assign a colour to each character and draw the lines by hand. No AI is involved at any stage.
You can see the Blade Runner plot map in full, browse the rest of the film plot map collection, or if you are buying for someone whose favourite film you are not certain of, there is an art print gift card.
