The Movie ‘Blade Runner’ Was Set In November 2019. So, Have You Seen Any Replicants Lately?

Ridley Scott’s visionary movie Blade Runner opened in 1982 but was set in November 2019, in a world of synthetic humans, flying cars, and mercenary wars on space colonies.

Now that the auspicious month has arrived, let’s take a look at where the movie (adapted from a sci-fi novel by Philip K. Dick) was prescient, and where it wasn’t.

“Blade Runner missed some big things like the internet and cell phones. On the bright side, we haven’t seen actual replicants yet," noted bioethics expert Dominic A. Sisti, Ph.D. and director of the Scattergood Program for Applied Ethics of Behavioral Health Care at the University of Pennsylvania.

The replicants to which Sisti refers are key to the Blade Runner plot: In the movie, much of the dirty work and fighting is done by synthetic humans, each given a four-year lifespan. When a band of replicants (led by Rutger Hauer) returns to Earth looking to extend those lifespans, detective Rick Deckard (Harrison Ford) is assigned to locate and eliminate them.