Cautionary Tale of ‘Blade Runner’ Is Lost on Adults of Future

In the dark and futuristic “Blade Runner,” humanlike robots seek revenge on their makers for having programmed them with limited lives. Humans retaliate by trying to destroy them. Rated R.

Only a couple of places in Orange County are showing the re-edited version of the 1982 movie, but a Fountain Valley father said he didn’t mind driving all the way to Newport Beach to see it. He said he wanted his three kids to see something a little more complex than “The Mighty Ducks.”

“This is their potential future in the year 2019,” he said. “They have to make the world the way they want it to be. It might not be all shopping malls and soccer every Saturday. It could be bleak, the way the economy’s going.”

Deanna, 11, said she found the movie “hard to understand” at first.

“I saw it 10 years ago, and I didn’t understand it either,” I told her. “I think I fell asleep.”

After a while, she said, she got the gist of the story and thought it was “pretty good.” But “there was a lot of killing. It was sick. I don’t like looking at blood.”

What she remembered most was a slow-motion scene of a female “replicant” being shot. “This one lady ran through a bunch of glass and had all these cuts.”

Her brothers Chris and Brian, 9 and 7, had the look of well-mannered children who had just been given an educational toy. Polite. Unenthusiastic.

They too didn’t get the story. “Did you understand those people were robots?” I asked Chris.

“No.”

Another minus, they said, was that it was always dark and raining.

Brian said the movie was good. There were, after all, cars that flew through the sky. “But I didn’t like the bloody scenes and the kissing,” he said.

This is the type of movie, their father explained, that they would discuss in the car on the way home. He would ask them, for instance, whether it was right for the humans to treat the replicants poorly just because they were robots. Or whether the world will really be like that, or better.

Good questions. Few answers.

“I wonder if they’ll really have robots like that,” I said.

“Yeah,” Deanna said. “That’d be neat.”

Brian said he thinks about the future some. But not about robots. “I think about the future of flying cars,” he said.