“I mentioned earlier Coppola’s belief that ‘something happens’ to the spectators as they sit in the dark and watch a movie. After he saw Blade Runner, Guillermo del Toro simply stated: ‘I never saw the world the same way again.’ If the movie is in part about replicants contaminated by the reality in which they live to the point of feeling as humans do, it is also about the way duplicate reality contaminates humans to the point of disrupting the feeling of their own humanity. In this sense, Pauline Kael may have been right in stating, when she first saw the movie: “It had not been thought out in human terms.”
—Marie-Hélène Huet, “Now Playing Everywhere,” The Culture of Disaster
