Funny, it never occurred to me that Deckard might himself be a replicant. That would ruin the whole story for me, which was about the dilemma of these artificial people and the reality of their emotions, including fear and hope. I never saw the ending as a happy one, since neither Deckard nor Rachael knew how long her life span was. Her situation, like that of Roy Batty and the others, is tragic, and it begs the question of how real “natural” humanity really is.
Philip K. Dick had a gift for confronting such unnerving questions about existence. His novel focuses on a world in which real animals were virtually impossible to distinguish from artificial ones and extremely rare and valuable. The Voight-Comp test is designed to discover inhuman responses to scenarios that are Un-PC in a world where PETA has re-educated everyone.
The film never loses its poignancy for me, mostly because of the acting of Sean Young, Daryl Hannah, Rutger Hauer and Harrison Ford’s reluctant hard-boiled policeman. There, but for the grace of God or the stem cell researchers, go we all.
