SOURCE: Ruppert, Peter. “Blade Runner: The Utopian Dialectics of Science Fiction Films.” Cineaste 17, no. 2 (1989): 8-13.

In the following essay, Ruppert argues that Blade Runner is critical of the dominant social ideology in late consumer capitalism, observing that the film expresses ideological ambiguities which arouse the spectator's desire for an alternative to the status quo.

Since first envisioned by Thomas More as an imaginary site that playfully maps out the possibilities for a rich and rewarding collective life. Utopia has been systematically undermined in its own form and survives today in a variety of grim and menacing visions (Orwell, Huxley. Zamyatin, and others)—visions that dramatically invert utopian images of collective well-being into images of collective dehumanization and collective extinction. Discrediting utopias as hopelessly naive and as potentially dangerous (totalitarian), these antiutopias or dystopias, as they have come to be known, see human possibilities in dark and despairing terms...