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Blade Runner is a science-fiction film set in the not too distant future, 2019. It portrays a bleak future – a large, dark, impersonal world. It is within this place that the film raises the central question – What is it that makes us human? What is it that distinguishes us from machines or objects that surround us? These questions are relevant to today’s world - increasingly dominated by computers, machines, advertising and entertainment. More people seem to be finding themselves living in an ‘inhuman’ world. It is a world where they feel alone. In the film’s first scenes the makers provide their answers to these questions, but before getting there a number of other possible answers are given and rejected. At the start of the film we learn that four replicants have escaped from slavery on another world and returned to Earth. A specialist replicant-hunter Rick Deckard, the Blade Runner, is given the job of tracking down these escapees and killing them. This is not, however, a simple chase film. In the beginning we see a person given a test, the ‘Voigt Kampff’ test. It is a test of his emotional reactions to situations. We will learn as the film progresses that this test is used to distinguish ‘replicantâ€