In the summer of 1982, a memorable science fiction film hit the theaters and became an instant phenomenon, becoming the most popular (and most remunerative) movie of the year. That movie was Steven Spielberg’s E.T.: The Extraterrestrial, one of the celebrated director’s most celebrated films, and one that is still popular over forty years later.

I went to see it that summer, and my verdict was: Ehh…

I was 16 at the time, almost 17, and well on my way to becoming an idealistic cynic. I thought the movie overly sentimental and too cloying by half. When the ugly little alien with the gorgeous blue eyes came back from the dead, the sound of my rolling eyes could have been heard for miles around.

Also coming out that summer was another SF film, this one not nearly as heralded and certainly neither as critically praised or monetarily successful as E.T. I went to see it and my mind exploded.

I had never seen a movie that looked like this before. It depicted a city (Los Angeles in the far distant year of 2019) that was simultaneously beautiful and hideous, full of blazing neon light and endless rain, dazzling futuristic buildings and crumbling ruins. Much of the populace was non-white, something I’d never seen in an sf movie (or encountered in an sf story, for that matter) at that time. All in all, it was the most original and breathtaking view of a futuristic city that I’d ever seen.

The movie was Ridley Scott’s Blade Runner, of course, and the last sentence of the previous paragraph still stands. Blade Runner was the most groundbreaking depiction of the urban future since Fritz Lang’s Metropolis (which I wouldn’t see for another five years). And I’m not the only one to have this opinion: William Gibson, who was writing Neuromancer at the time he first saw the film, thought the movie was scooping his own work. “The damned movie looked better than the images in my  head!” he would say.

Oh, yes, and layered into the magnificent/horrific cityscape there is a plot, involving Harrison Ford (in a supremely restrained performance) as Rick Deckard, a “blade runner” (bounty hunter) pursuing a band of escaped replicants (essentially biological androids) led by Rutger Hauer and Daryl Hannah, and falling in love with another replicant, played by Sean Young.

Much has been said and written about how the artificial people in the film are much more alive than the actual humans, and whether or not that was a deliberate choice on Ridley Scott’s part. Given that Scott intended Harrison Ford’s character to be a replicant himself, it probably was not, but I agree with critic Danny Peary that the movie is much more interesting if Deckard is biologically human and that he only learns to be fully human from the examples of the “artificial” people he is hunting.

(Denis Villeneuve, when making his sequel Blade Runner 2049, was careful not to tread on anyone’s toes, giving no firm indication as to whether Deckard is human or not.)

Blade Runner is now of course a cult classic, but not only was it generally critically panned on its initial release (much like Alien was), it also was slow to gain acceptance among sf fans. The reason for the latter, I think, is that it is adapted from Philip K. Dick’s novel Do Androids Dream of Electric Sheep, and yet prunes out most of the distinctive traits characteristic of Dick’s work: The large ensemble cast, the questioning of reality, and the general sense of absurdity, among other things. When, many years after I first saw the movie, I read the novel, it felt like a completely different story that just happened to have characters with the same name as the movie. Had I read it first, I too might have found the movie a disappointment, at first. Electric Sheep is, I would say, thematically richer than Blade Runner, but of course it doesn’t have the latter’s powerhouse world-building.

In truth, very few of the film adaptations of Philip Dick’s works fully capture the Dickishness (so to speak) of the novels. Some have been very good (Spielberg’s Minority Report) and some very bad (Paul Verhoeven’s Total Recall), but precious few have embodied the cosmic paranoia and reality-bending that pervade his written word. Honestly, the only adaptation I can think of that does is Rick Linklater’s little-seen adaptation of A Scanner Darkly, which is eminently worth seeing.

But what the movie lacks in Dickesque mind-bendiness, Blade Runner makes up for in Ridley Scott’s visual smorgasbord. Coming on the heels of Alien, Blade Runner seemed to mark Scott as one of the greatest science fiction film directors. He seemed quite ready to acknowledge this himself, telling Harlan Ellison “the time is ripe for a John Ford of science fiction films to come along, and I’m going to be that guy.” He then proceeded to not make another sf film for thirty years, finally coming back to make two poor-to-mediocre Alien spinoffs and the respectable-but-hardly-spectacular The Martian. Of course, he also turned out dozens of other movies, a few making a big splash but many more disappearing without a trace. Even those in the former category (such as Thelma and Louise and Gladiator) are overrated, full of sound and fury and generally signifying nothing. The visual genius behind Alien and Blade Runner seems to have withered away.

But we still have those two masterpieces, and if you’ve made two of the greatest science fiction movies of all time, maybe that’s enough.