British version or Netflix version? I gave the first season of the Netflix version a try; David Fincher just wears me out because he hates people so much.

I think it's difficult to separate Blade Runner from its cultural milieu. It did not do well at the box office, yet in backwater New Mexico there were TV ads celebrating trivia prizes for people who went to see it five, ten, twenty times. It was a Syd Mead future,

an Enki Bilal future,

not a Ralph McQuarrie future

and since then, the tide has turned. Realistically speaking, the Replicants born in an impossible future back in 1982 are alive now.

It's also more of a gestalt work than a lot of films. You can watch Chinatown for the dialogue and plot. You can watch Star Wars for the SFX and one-liners. So much of Blade Runner is non-diagetic, though - not just the audio, but a lot of the visuals. It's halfway to being a Peter Greenaway film.

I think you have to have lived through the Cold War to really grok Gibson's Neuromancer. And I think you had to have seen the Sparkly '70s collapse into the Dirty '80s to truly appreciate Blade Runner. Unfortunately, lots of critics and cultural writers were right there with it so that's the only perspective you get.

Alien was, in many ways, a parable for the coal closures in '70s UK. It's still a hell of a horror film but... I mean, you lose a lot of the impact of Wizard of Oz if you don't know who William Jennings Bryan was. Blade Runner was too busy fleeing its own failure to really be the masterpiece it could have been, and without really understanding where it comes from, it becomes just another overrated sci fi film.