The Epic..! Blade Runner.

The first time I saw Blade runner as a kid, I wasn't impressed. Maybe because I expected more action from a Sci-Fi movie. Then I rented it on DVD a few years later, and upon re-watching I figured something out, this is one of the very few movies that gets better the more often you see it and grows into you. And once that happens, you will start respecting the beauty and subtlety of the masterpiece. Slowly but surely this one has made it into my 'best movies of all time' list.

The movie is not one of those action packed thrill rides where you just see amazing inter-galactic explosions and colossal wars between mutated alien races. This movie is truly rich in the sense of its magnificent plot and the way things come together slowly towards the end and the journey is indeed a swashbuckling yet sweet voyage. It's really close to an art movie, the first science-fiction art film is how I would want to put it. It indeed is a futuristic film beautifully put together. Impeccably made by one of the great visionary directors. And the future that we experience, looks very different from the one we had seen before. A future that looked very believable; given the visual-effect shots of anti-gravity cars zooming the aerial freeway tunnels over the fantastic looking city. The fight sequence doesn't prepare us for the traumatic emotional side that there is in the film, it leaves us sort of broken.

There is a beautiful, delicate, honest and emotional scene that touched my heart when I first saw the movie and wait for it, time and time again. I was so drawn to what Rutger Hauer was doing, drawn in by what the theme of the movie has brought us to. The true magnificent moment where he is letting go of life. And in those last moments, he learns to appreciate life to the point where he spares Deckard's life, and where he holds a white dove because he just wants to have something that's alive in his hands. It's an amazing sort of crescendo that's going and he then says: "I've seen things you people wouldn't believe. Attack ships on fire off the shoulder of Orion. I watched c-beams glitter in the dark near the Tanhauser Gate. All these moments will be lost in time like tears in rain." Hauer puts all the things that are so amazing about people: sense of poetry, humor, sense of sexuality, and sense of the soul. This is one of my favorite scene in the entire picture, well, there indeed are many, but this just rings a bell, every time I see it. The movie truly makes us feel the story, the emotions of the characters, the surroundings and by the end, we get lost in the midst of this wild world, rich yet painful, dark yet filled with compassion.

The set design is something else that always gets me. When ever I see the movie, I keep searching for new things and end up finding something. The overpopulated, sort of crowded scenes are so rich and varied and there's such an extreme attention to detail designing even when we look at something as simple as the magazine covers, designing the look of the punks, the Hare Krishnas, the biological salesman, precisely everything. We get a sense of the layers of the society and how the future would look, or may be could look. That is one of those things that I see again and again and it makes me think.

Blade Runner, to me, is one of the classic, beautiful, pure movie-making writings. The images, the music and the world lost in time, is pure cinema.