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A handful of superhuman androids escape off-world servitude and return to Earth, and it’s up to a disillusioned cop to stop them, permanently. In other hands, or a few more years deeper into the ’80s, Blade Runner might have ended up just another sci-fi actioner with might restoring right, but the 1982 movie was based on a Philip K. Dick novel and director Ridley Scott was more ambitious. The androids return to Earth because they’re asking the same questions all of us are: Where did I come from? Why am I here? And, most importantly, how long do I have left? That existential underpinning gives the hard-boiled plot and the sci-fi atmospherics an extra dimension that has made Blade Runner one of the most beloved and influential movies of the past 25 years. Ironically, it’s also one of the least successfully imitated. Scores of directors and production designers have ripped off Scott and company’s vision of our future as a decaying, rain-soaked, multiethnic urban hive, but their version still looks as fresh as it did a quarter century ago; the android “replicants” (especially Rutger Hauer and Daryl Hannah) are so charismatic and so ultimately childlike in their wonder at the world and their fear of death that they wind up seeming more human than Deckard (Harrison Ford), the man sent to end them, much less their counterparts in other movies.

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