Humanity In Blade Runner

Blade Runner’s glory is not only derived from its stunning visual and auditory imagery of the brooding metal cityscape, but also from its philosophical themes. Most importantly, it tells the difficulties humans have realizing what makes them human, and moreover leads people to ponder the intrinsic “humanity”.

With respect to humanity, in the movie, what is supposed to distinguish replicants from human beings is whether they have the ability to feel and show certain emotions, especially the love, desire, and empathy. Stronger and more specialized than their maker, the replicants with the human-like appearance are tagged without emotions and humanity since in most people’s eyes, they are regarded machinery, inanimate robots, or genetic programs.

Besides the hybridized bond of love highly emphasized in the movie, the nature of humanity also involves the fear of death, or the desire of survival, as it is revealed in the dialogue between God (Tyrell) and Satan (Roy) when they finally face one another. “What seems to be the problem?” Tyrell asks. “Death,” Roy responds. For four-year-old replicants, the only motivation to return to earth and meet the maker in every possible way is nothing but their longing for life, although facing the risk of being retired. The replicants are not exact human yet they are eager to survive. There are several dramatic scenes depicting life-and-death displays, especially in the example of Priss’s death sequence after she is shot by Deckard: an exaggerated, spasmodic, sprawling, and disjointed struggle, which brings the audiences as close to the edge of death as possible. Consider the hunter Deckard or other detectives, empathy is another emotional trait that most of the “human characters” never display. However, at the end of the movie, Roy, the leader of replicants, is the character who displays this trait the most. On the brink of his own death, rather than take revenge,

“More human than human” is Tyrell company’s motto, and it can be true since compared with the mass of desperate and impersonal people on the street or the ruthless detectives, those replicants, indeed, shows their love and concerns between each other as well as passions and empathy for life, as Roy confidently says to Sebastian, “we’re not computers. We’re physical.” Ironically, Deckard acts as a cold-hearted hunter initially, but as the movie continues, we find that Deckard starts to care about Rachael and begins to discover his own human qualities even though his main job is to hunt down replicants like Roy who are also show their “human” traits in themselves. Here, we humans might raise the same questions as Deckard does: are replicants really human? Should they be killed simply because they have the same longing for life with